How long does a kitchen remodel take?

A cosmetic refresh can be a couple of weeks. A full gut, where the room comes back to the studs, takes longer, especially if it moves a wall or relocates plumbing: usually several weeks of work in the house, and a couple of months or more from the first drawing to the finished room once you count design, ordering and permitting. The build is rarely the long part. Waiting on cabinets and approvals is.

Can I stay in the house during a kitchen remodel?

Most people do, with a temporary setup, a microwave and a sink somewhere else. It is livable, not fun. If the project is long or the kitchen is the only path through the house, some families plan to be out for the worst stretch.

What is the most expensive change to make in the middle of a kitchen remodel?

Moving something that is already roughed in: a sink, a gas line, a wall. Once it is set and closed up, changing it means undoing finished work. Decide those before the walls close.

The Reno homeowner’s guide to a kitchen remodel

A kitchen is the hardest room in the house to remodel, because it is three projects wearing one name: a layout, a set of systems buried in the walls, and a room you use every single day. Here is what to decide, in what order, and what each decision costs you if you get it wrong.

Talk through your kitchen All planning notes

Published: 6 October 2026
Subject: The three decisions a kitchen turns on
Applies to: Reno, Sparks, Washoe County
Faster than reading: (775) 200-0648, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM

01Why it is hard

A kitchen is three projects at once.

There is the layout, where everything goes. There are the systems, the plumbing, gas and electrical run behind the walls and under the floor. And there is daily life, because you still have to eat while it is torn apart. Most kitchen regret is a layout or a systems decision, not a finish decision. Nobody loses sleep over the tile. They lose it over the wall they wish they had moved.

02The three that matter

Three decisions set the whole project. The rest is detail.

The layout, whether a wall moves, and the budget. Get those three right and the countertop is just a countertop. Get one wrong and every other choice inherits the mistake. Each one is worth doing carefully, and in this order.

Settle the layout first, before you fall for a finish, because where the sink, the range and the refrigerator land decides how much plumbing, gas and wiring has to move.

Find out whether the wall you want gone is load-bearing, which means it carries the weight of the floor or roof above it down to the foundation, before you plan to knock it out.

And know what a kitchen actually costs here before you scope a project your budget cannot finish. For a standard kitchen of about 150 square feet, a refresh that keeps the layout starts around twenty thousand in Reno and Sparks. That is a starting range, not a quote, and the remodel cost calculator will size one to your own room, finish level and the age of the house.

03The sequence

A kitchen gets built in an order, and part of it cannot be redone.

Early on, the rough-in goes in: the plumbing, gas and electrical that live inside the walls and floor. Then it all gets closed up. That is the moment the layout stops being a decision and becomes a fact. If the layout was still soft when the rough-in went in, changing your mind later means reopening finished walls, which is the single most expensive way to remodel a kitchen. That is why the order above is not optional.

04What goes wrong

Most of the kitchen mistakes we see in Reno were made on paper first.

The wall came out before anyone confirmed it was structural, and a weekend of demolition turned into an engineered beam, one sized by an engineer to carry what the wall used to. The layout changed after the rough-in, and the plumber came back to move a drain that was already set. The cabinets got ordered before the appliances were chosen, and the refrigerator no longer fit its slot. Every one of these is a planning miss, not a building miss, which is the good news: they are all avoidable on paper.

The parts of a kitchen project that every remodel shares, how to hire, the contract, the permit, and living without a kitchen for a few weeks, are covered in the guide to planning a remodel, so this page can stay about the kitchen itself. And if you want to see those three misses designed out, how we run a kitchen remodel sets out the order we work in, with the appliances specified before the cabinetry and a temporary kitchen set up before demolition.

05Questions

Three questions we get about kitchens.

06Keep going

Three pages for the parts a kitchen shares with every remodel.

Planning a remodel, in order

How you hire, the contract, the permit and living in the house: the shared steps, in the order they come.

What a remodel costs in Reno and Sparks

Where a kitchen starts beside a bathroom and an addition, what sets the number, and why no single price is printed for any of them.

Living in the house while it is open

Dust containment, the order rooms go offline in, and the weeks without a kitchen.

07Start a conversation

Thinking about your kitchen? Start with the three decisions.

Send us the space and the address, and we will walk the layout, the walls and a real range with you before anything gets ordered.

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