Should You Remodel Your Kitchen Or Your Bathroom?

When it comes to kitchens and baths, these two rooms are the most difficult—and often most expensive—parts of a home to remodel. In many cases, the amounts of money involved mean that for the average American, you may have to choose between one or the other, instead of doing both at the same time.

If this is your position, which one should you look at? A few different factors will influence your decision one way or the other.

Return On Investment

If you are putting your home up for sale, the kitchen should be your choice. In most cases, a new kitchen is one of the most attractive points that buyers are looking for. If you budget the remodel smartly, you can considera-bly add to the home’s final sale price. However, keep in mind that this kind of “sales value spike” most com-monly applies to homes going on sale quickly. If you plan to live in your home for ten more years, this will not be a factor.

Budget

Unless you’re in the top 1% of the American population, you won’t have unlimited funds to spend on your kitchens and baths. That’s one reason why you’re picking one over the other. Every remodel situation is going to be different depending on the scale. Typically, however, if both rooms will require about the same amount of work, kitchens usually are more expensive overall than bathroom remodels. Of course, this depends on your scale of work. Remodeling an existing kitchen, for example, will be cheaper than building in a new bathroom where none was before.

Time

If this is a factor, again, keep in mind, specific situations will have their own particular timelines. However, in general, one thing that’s usually true on average is that bathrooms will take less time to remodel than kitch-ens—one reason for this simple math. Bathrooms are generally smaller than kitchens, so there is less area that needs to be worked on. If you’re in a situation where you’d like to keep the “downtime” to a minimum, a bath-room remodel will often take several days to finish versus a kitchen remodel, which may take a few months.

Inconvenience

People that buy a home have the luxury of choosing to remodel before moving in. That means all the work is done while they’re not there. However, if you’re already living in your home and thinking about a remodel, there can be some significant disruption to your day-to-day, and you may need to take this into account. Remodeling a kitchen may mean switching to using a grill or other portable cooking implements outside, or even eating out the entire time. Remodeling a bathroom means losing the use of that bathroom, or possibly losing the use of water throughout the whole home until specific jobs are done.