Kick off summer with home improvement projects | Home

If we’re honest, there’s never truly an ideal time to remodel your house or perform desired – but invasive – home improvement products. Having workers in your home and parts of it unavailable due to renovations is never convenient. But least in Central Ohio, if you have to get the work done, it’s often best to do it during the warmer months of the summer. As the work season begins to ramp up, the Columbus Jewish News spoke with local contractors and experts about the work they’re performing this summer, and what aspects of the house homeowners should consider sprucing while the days are long and hot.

One big, though slightly obvious, benefit to working in the summer is that it’s a lot easier to spend time outside. For this reason, Kathy S. Morgan, president and general contractor at Organized Home Remodeling LLC/Functional Living Design Group in Powell, said they got a lot of requests to work on kitchens in the summer.

“People like to be able to work outside, cook on their grill,” Morgan said. “You just give them a lot more flexibility while the construction is going on in the house. They feel more comfortable about being able to get outside or go on vacation. So, we definitely see an uptick in kitchens during the good weather months.”

Bill McMaster, president of Simple Bath + Kitchen, based in Hilliard, agreed summer was a popular time for kitchens.

“There’s no convenient way to remodel your kitchen, there’s going to be some level of inconvenience, because we all use our kitchen so much and most of us only have one of them,” he said. “One of the nice things we can do though at Simple Bath + Kitchen is remodel an entire kitchen in one week, so we can minimize that. Almost everybody can live off the grills for a couple of dinners or lunches and minimize the inconvenience in the summer, where it’s easier to cook outside or eat outside than it is in the winter.”

Besides requests for kitchen remodels, the experts have also seen their share of mistakes and misconceptions regarding renovations. One common pitfall Morgan said homeowners should avoid are half-measures, such as simply wanting to replace countertops.

“When you update a countertop, you’ve also got a sink, you’ve got a faucet and you’ve your backsplash file,” she explained. “The problem is … it’s going to be even more expensive, and they don’t think about the fact that they’re putting that stone on top of cheap cabinets, if they still have the original cabinets that a builder put in. … You’ve invested and spent all that money to upgrade just a countertop and the rest of the kitchen apparatus that goes with that. You’re not going to change your cabinets down the road unless you change everything, so I try to talk people out of that and do an update, because they think it’s a simple fix, it’s not going to cost them as much. But down the road, it’s going to cost them more.”

McMaster warned projects often take longer than homeowners expect and what the process means to their daily lives.

“It’s one of the reasons we focus on projects that we can do very well in a short period of time,” he noted. “That’s not always the case. … I think a lot of people are prepared projects costing more. People are less prepared or make the mistake of assuming that, ‘well, they said it was going to be a month and my party’s in a month, so if we start today, we’ll be OK.’ Unfortunately, across the industry, that’s often not the case.”

Ed Carroll is a freelance journalist.