My husband and I spent almost three years saving for the house we eventually built outside Lancaster, and about three weeks nearly ruining it. The ruin would have been a kitchen. On paper it was perfect. Our architect had drawn a long galley with an island, a pantry tucked behind sliding doors and a window over the sink that looked straight out to the field where our neighbor keeps his two very opinionated goats. We signed off on the plans in March. We were ready to break ground in May.
What stopped us was a set of pictures.
The Drawings We Thought We Understood
I want to be honest about how confident we were. I cook a lot. I write about food for a living, more or less, and I have strong feelings about where the cutting board should live in relation to the stove. I had looked at those floor plans for hours. I had measured our old kitchen and walked the new dimensions out with painter’s tape on the floor of our rental. I knew that kitchen.
Except I didn’t, not really. A floor plan is a map, and a map tells you where things are without telling you what it feels like to stand there at six in the evening with three pans going. When our builder suggested we have the main rooms rendered before we committed, I nearly said no. It felt like an expense for people with bigger budgets than ours, like hiring a stylist for a weekday.
He told me something that changed my mind. In his experience, the most expensive day of a build is the day a client walks into a framed room and says, “Oh. I thought it would be bigger.” Moving a wall at that point means change orders, delays and a crew standing around. Moving a wall on a screen costs almost nothing.
What the Renderings Showed Us
The architect’s office worked with a studio that offers architectural rendering services, and about two weeks later we got a link to a folder of images. There were views of the front of the house in late afternoon light, a couple of the back porch, the living room, the main bedroom and four of the kitchen from different corners.
The exterior made me cry a little, which I will deny if asked. The kitchen made me put my coffee down.
It was dark. Not gloomy, just darker than it ever looked in my head. The window over the sink was the only real source of daylight, and because the island sat between it and the stove, anyone cooking had their back to the light and their shadow on the counter. The pantry doors, which I had loved on the plan, opened directly into the path between the island and the fridge. In one of the images the rendering artist had left a pantry door half open, probably without thinking about it, and you could see immediately that two people could not get past each other.
In the drawing he could stand anywhere. In the picture there was nowhere.
I sat with those pictures for an evening. My husband, who had happily let me run the kitchen discussion until then, looked over my shoulder and said, “Where am I supposed to stand when you’re cooking?” There was no good answer. In the drawing he could stand anywhere. In the picture there was nowhere.
Changing It While It Was Still Cheap
We went back to the architect the following week with a list.
The four changes we made:
- Add a second window on the east wall, so the morning light comes in over the prep area
- Swing the island around so it runs parallel to the window instead of across it
- Move the pantry entrance to the dining side of the room
- Widen the walkway by eight inches, which felt silly on paper and turned out to be the single best decision we made
The studio updated the model in a few days. The second set of images looked like a different house. The light came in from two directions, the island faced out toward the field, and in one view somebody had put a bowl of lemons on the counter by the new window. That bowl of lemons is still there, more or less, because I bought one just like it as soon as we moved in. If you are weighing window choices of your own, this guide to energy-efficient windows and home comfort covers how windows affect light, comfort, and costs.
All of those changes together cost us a few hundred dollars in revised drawings and one more round of images. Our builder estimated that making the same changes after framing would have cost several thousand and pushed the schedule back by a month, maybe more if the window had to be reordered. Budgeting a cushion for changes like these is good practice on any project, and this piece on how to afford the home upgrades you’ve been putting off is a useful companion for planning one.
See also
Moving a wall on a screen costs almost nothing.
Things I Would Tell Anyone Building
I have had friends ask about this since we moved in, usually after they have stood in the kitchen and admired the light, so here is what I tell them.
What I tell friends who are building:
- Render the rooms you will live in most, not the rooms that look prettiest. For us that was the kitchen and the porch. The guest bathroom could have been anything.
- Look at the pictures at the time of day you actually use the room. We asked for one view of the kitchen at dusk, and that was the image that showed us the shadow problem most clearly.
- Study the small details the artist adds, a half-open door, a chair pulled out, a towel on the oven handle. They are often the moment you realize how the room really works.
- Bring the person you live with. My husband had looked at the plans exactly once. The renderings were the first time he understood the house we were building, and he had better ideas about the porch than I did.
Kitchens in particular reward this kind of scrutiny. If you are still collecting ideas on layout and function, these kitchen remodel ideas for cooking and entertaining are worth a look before you finalize anything.
A Year In
We have been in the house just over a year now. The goats are still next door. The kitchen gets morning sun on the cutting board and evening sun on the table, which is exactly where you want both. Every so often I open that first folder of images, the dark version, just to remind myself how close we came. It is a perfectly nice kitchen. I am very glad it only ever existed on a screen.
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