Home remodels inevitably cause disruption in any family’s life, and remodeling a kitchen can be even more disruptive than most remodels. The kitchen is the heart of the home. When you remodel a kitchen, it can feel like having open-heart surgery on your home, as everything that sustains your household is laid bare. By organizing your remodeling project, much of the stress from remodeling a kitchen can be avoided.

Organize Before Remodeling a Kitchen

Before you begin a home remodel project, it’s important to create some sort of order before the chaos begins. With the average kitchen remodel, this means sorting out everyday equipment, such as plates, cutlery, utensils, and cups, and putting these things where you can easily get to them.

Putting everything in boxes will help keep everything orderly until you have proper storage space again. This is also a good occasion to get rid of those things you no longer use.

Plan and Review What You Want in a Kitchen

Before any actual work begins, it’s important to understand your motivations for remodeling your kitchen. Start by looking at kitchen designs in magazines, online, and in friend’s homes. Save photos of those designs that you would like to incorporate into your kitchen renovation.

Think about what you want your kitchen to do. Do you want to make it a gathering place for the family? Are you considering what would be best for resale? Do you want to make it easy to navigate for several cooks?

Once you’ve decided on how you want to use your kitchen, move on to pricing. Decide what you want, what you need, and what you can afford. Compare the material and installation costs that you want against what you can afford. Compare this to the price of the average kitchen remodel.

If there’s a date when you absolutely need your kitchen, set the completion date a couple weeks before to allow for delays. Before considering when to remodel, sit your family down and let them know what to expect during the remodeling process. Make plans for cooking while the kitchen is down, and help others in the household cope by letting them know exactly what will be going on and when. Knowing there is an end date will help others in the household cope.

The Average Kitchen Remodel and You

It often helps when organizing to know what others think and did when remodeling a kitchen. Here are a few statistics from an AOL survey to keep in mind about what people regret, opted into, or experienced with the average kitchen remodel:

• 11 percent say they should have done more research
• 12 percent say they wish they would have used different materials
• 84 percent chose energy efficient appliances
• 43 percent opted for water saving appliances
• 10 percent used green flooring
• 2 percent chose environmentally friendly countertops
• 41 percent reported some problem with their contractor
• 20 percent paid 10 percent more than the estimate
• 36 percent of remodels took at least two weeks longer than initially planned.