Good Neighbor Podcast Northport
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of Tuscaloosa and Northport!
Good Neighbor Podcast Northport
Mike Juniak: Revitalizing Kitchens with Cost-Effective Solutions at Kitchen Tune-Up Hoover
Discover how you can transform your kitchen without breaking the bank with insights from Mike Juniak, the local franchise owner of Kitchen Tune-Up in Hoover. Join us as Mike shares his inspiring transition from IT project management to owning a business that revitalizes kitchens while preserving high-quality cabinet structures. Learn about Kitchen Tune-Up's unique services like cabinet refacing and re-dooring, which provide a fresh look without the cost and hassle of complete replacements. Mike explains why updating durable cabinet boxes from the 1990s can be more beneficial than opting for newer, less resilient alternatives.
In our conversation, Mike delves into the hurdles faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and how being part of a franchise offered invaluable support, including adopting virtual consultations and ensuring safe home visits. He opens up about his experience managing two franchise locations and the successful strategies his team employed to meet customer needs during challenging times. We wrap up with practical advice for anyone contemplating a kitchen makeover. Before considering a full renovation, explore the cost-effective solutions offered by Kitchen Tune-Up that can rejuvenate your space beautifully. To find out more, visit KitchenTuneUp.com or reach out to their team directly for a consultation.
#KitchenTuneUp #KitchenMakeover #CabinetRefacing #AffordableRenovation #KitchenInspiration #HomeImprovementIdeas #HooverHomeUpdates #FranchiseSuccess #EntrepreneurJourney #CareerPivot #SmallBusinessStories #LocalBusinessLove #FromITtoEntrepreneur #PandemicPivot #BusinessAdaptability #VirtualConsultations #ResilientBusiness #HomeRenovationTips #AffordableLuxury #KitchenUpgrade #DIYHomeIdeas #PodcastCommunity #ListenAndLearn #GNPBirmingham
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Patricia Blondheim.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I'm your host, patricia Blondheim, and today we're speaking to Good Neighbor Mike Juniak, and Mike is the local franchise owner of Kitchen Tune-Up in Hoover. Mike, how are you today?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great. Patricia, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Can you tell us a little bit about Kitchen Tune-Up and the services you specialize in?
Speaker 3:Yeah, kitchen Tune-Up was founded in 1988 by David Hagl. David Hagland had a cabinet business at the time, but he found that a lot of times the cabinets were in great shape. They just needed what he thought was a tune-up. So that was, you know, a process to add the finish back onto the cabinets getting the look new again, replacing, you know, worn bumpers that are on there, uh, fixing and lubricating hinges and slides just to get the cabinets working again. You know, they're perfectly great cabinets, they just needed a tune-up. So that's where kitchen tune-up was born.
Speaker 2:Well, what inspired you to bring kitchen tune-up to this community?
Speaker 3:um, I was looking for a business. I've done years and years with IT as a project manager with my hobby and my passion was carpentry. So I just kind of flipped things around. So now my business is carpentry and my hobby is IT work. So it just allowed me to start a local business. And you know, get back to the community I reached out to the franchise system and you know, I found Kitchen Tune Up and they just seemed to be a great franchise and a lot of support and you know, I just thought it was a good fit.
Speaker 2:Well, your website highlights a variety of services, right From cabinet refacing to custom cabinetry. What service do you find is most popular with your customers, and why yeah?
Speaker 3:the kitchen tune-up started with the tune-up but we've also gotten into cabinet painting, re-dooring, refacing and full custom kitchens. Probably our most popular is re-dooring, refacing and full custom kitchens. Probably our most popular is the re-dooring. You know people want to take those dated you know 1990s, you know honey oak cabinets and make them look new. The boxes are fantastic boxes. You're looking at an oak box that you know if you replaced, replaced it today, they'd probably replace it with part, part of the board. So we can take that oak box and then put a new door on it and change the style of the cabinet. So instead of that raised panel oak door, you can now have a shaker door on that cabinet. It looks new, it looks modern and the boxes are are better than anything you can buy at a big box store today.
Speaker 2:Right, it's fantastic. Right, because if you buy new cabinets, say, you're going to go through a cabinet company that sends you the cabinets in the box say IKEA, a local big box store or something like that you're going to end up with heavy cabinets but they're made out of particle board. So it isn't the irony that it's particle board. When it gets wet, it's going to expand, it's going to deform, it's going to warp, you know, and these cabinets are right underneath your water source, and maybe you're duplicating the cabinets that you have already. Or maybe the structure that you have already is something that you can work around. Those cabinet carcasses, right, the boxes are incredible. They're almost irreplaceable at this time.
Speaker 3:Well, you're going to pay a premium to get a box that's built like the boxes were built in the 90s. Back then the wood was a lot cheaper. They could use a higher quality wood. They weren't using particle board.
Speaker 3:They weren't using you know and a lot of people don't realize this particle board that they're using actually has vinyl on the outside of it to make it look like wood. So they're taking a very cheap piece of wood and literally putting a sticker on it to build your cabinets. And you know, like you said, as soon as the water gets in there it wicks up through that particle board, the particle board blisters and there's no saving it at that point. You can't sand it, you can't, you know, refinish it, you can't do anything. That cabinet needs to come out and be replaced. Matter of fact, that's. A good portion of my business is actually replacing particle board cabinets. Matter of fact, that's a good portion of my business is actually replacing particle board cabinets.
Speaker 3:I don't use them. I use all plywood. It lasts longer. If it gets wet, it's not going to swell, it's not going to, you know, delaminate and come apart. So you know it's better to go. You know, a lot of times it's better to keep those old wood cabinets that are made of plywood versus putting out something new that's particle board. I go into these million-dollar homes, particle board cabinets.
Speaker 2:It's just amazing to me, you can make these cabinets look entirely new. They might not be pretty, but that doesn't mean that they can't look absolutely new through this process with kitchen tune-up Absolutely.
Speaker 3:You know. So what we're going to do on a re-dooring, we're going to, we're going to order a brand new door. So it's going to be a brand new door that's going to go onto the cabinet box. On the box itself, we're going to come in and we're going to do a light sanding on that box. We're going to use a special primer, a special paint on top. That's going to get that box looking new. It's going to give it a factory finish on that old box. So when the old box is there with a brand new finish on it, put the new door on it. It looks like a brand new set of cabinets.
Speaker 1:The other advantages that you have is the process that we use.
Speaker 3:We're going to clean up at the end of the day, so you can still use your kitchen through that whole process, whereas if somebody came in and gutted your kitchen to do it, you're looking about two to three weeks of doing the dishes in the bathroom, you know, and that's never fun. It's not a good process. So by actually doing a re-during or refacing, you can still use your kitchen. You're not eating out, you're not, you know, doing dishes in the bathroom. You know your life hasn't been totally turned upside down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you decide you're going to do, you know, a kitchen overhaul there's, there's a pretty good chance you can still reuse those carcasses in a different place. Just replace them, you know, as in, put them in a different place in a different order, and even fill in with other cabinets if you want to. But there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to use the cabinets, and a lot of people are really concerned about sustainability, you know.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. You know, keeping the carcasses in place and putting new doors on it does keep a lot out of the landfills. When I have wood doors that I pull off, I actually have a place that does woodworking training and I donate those doors to them and they actually use the wood from those doors to actually build new projects and things like that. But we can also mix and match. You mentioned sometimes moving boxes around. What we can do is, in a lot of cases, if you want to change the floor plan of your kitchen, instead of yanking all the old boxes out, we leave the boxes in place. We add a few boxes here and there. Then we use that same re-dooring or re-facing process to either put a veneer over all the boxes or paint all the boxes and put new doors on everything, and then you can't discern which ones are old and which ones are new and you have a whole new kitchen. So we can change the floor plan of a kitchen and still reuse the old boxes in a lot of cases.
Speaker 2:And it saves you money.
Speaker 3:It saves people a lot of money. Usually a re-dooring or a refacing is going to come in at one-third to one-half the cost of a new kitchen.
Speaker 2:Well, my running the business can be intense. I think you'll agree. Yes, what do you do for fun outside of your work?
Speaker 3:Well, my wife actually owns a gymnastics gym in Hoover, alabama and my two daughters are head coaches there. So you know they're in competition season right now, so a lot of my time is spent cheering them on and going to the meets and just cheering on the team. Other than that, you know, I, you know I spent a lot of time. Like I said, I kind of flipped my hobby and my work around. So I do some IT work on the side as kind of a hobby and you know I also continue to do carpentry and woodworking, just, you know, for fun. And building furniture is just fun to me. It's, you know, a bunch of ballgame, you know watch them all game.
Speaker 2:And speaking of intensity, or you know, or challenges, can you share a hardship that you've encountered and maybe how you overcame it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know, I started, I bought the franchise in 2019. And, as you know, it was straight into COVID. So I, here I was, with a brand new franchise, straight into covet. Everything that I learned from a marketing standpoint, everything I learned from a sales standpoint in the training for the franchise system pretty much went out the door. Um, you know, the advantage, though, is being part of a franchise system, like kitchen tune-up. You know I had the support of the, the central office team, so they helped us through that a lot of-up. You know I had the support of the, the central office team, so they helped us through that.
Speaker 3:A lot of different things, you know we had to, we had to learn to do. You know, virtual sales calls we had to learn. You know, yeah, how to you know test and and make sure that everybody that was going to the houses would test before they go into the houses. So you know, it turned out to be an advantage versus a hardship.
Speaker 3:You know, at first it was a hardship because we didn't know what to do, and you know, at that point, I thought, oh my gosh, what have I done? But it kind of we kind of turned that around and turned it into more of an advantage for us, because where people didn't want to go out of their house and go into a big box store or go into this major store to pick out cabinets, we could come to their home and meet them one-on-one and go through and pick out the cabinets and get them a solution that's still price competitive with the big box stores, because we're a national franchise but yet didn't have them going all over the place searching for something while you know everybody's worried about COVID. So that was kind of the hardship that we got around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we really learned a lot about ourselves and about how business really can be run by having to pivot in that very short period of time. When you look back on it, I look back on it, and I wonder how we did it. We did it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I actually for a while owned two of these. I owned this one in Hoover and then I owned another one that was in Michigan. That's run by my sister. That one I purchased in December of 2019.
Speaker 3:And my sister was actually at training when all the COVID announcements came out and it was so bad, she had a trouble getting home from the training Because at that point training was in South Dakota and yeah, it's just crazy. You know, like I said, I at that point I was pulling my hair out, going what have I done? Um, but we were able to turn it around and and get things moving.
Speaker 2:We all have stories to tell, don't we?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What, what message or or takeaway would you like our listeners to leave with about Kitchen.
Speaker 3:Tune-Up takeaway would you like our listeners to leave with about kitchen tune-up. Um, probably the biggest thing is, you know, like, like we said earlier, you know, before you rip out those old boxes before you, you tear down that kitchen looking for something new, you know call kitchen tune-up. Have us come out and take a look at it. You know we can give you price options from the tune-up process to restore the wood and get them looking new again. If you like the style of the cabinets, we can do repainting, we can do redrawing, refacing. You know let's look at those solutions before you jump into a whole new custom kitchen and a lot of times to save a lot of money. You know you can. You can turn that around and instead of paying all this money for a new kitchen, you can get a new kitchen and take a vacation for the same amount.
Speaker 2:You sold me. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about Kitchen, tune Up or schedule a consultation?
Speaker 3:KitchenTuneUpcom is the best way to reach out for us. You can also give us a call at 205-800-7060. That is our call center and they'll take an appointment. We do free estimates. So have us come out and take a look at stuff. And there's also on the kitchentuneupcom site. There's a couple tools out there. One is our door catalog so you can see all of our different door selections that are available, um you know, and get some ideas. And also on that site is a design tool. This tool is great for if you're just kind of thinking through what you want to do with your kitchen. It gives you some generic layout, kitchen layouts. You can go in there. You can play around with colors. You can play around with colors. You can play around with different finishes. You know, change countertop styles, backsplash, wall color, cabinet color, just play around with all that just to get a good idea of what you're looking for and then give us a call and we can come out and make it a reality.
Speaker 2:Wonderful, Mike. Thank you for coming by and before we wrap up, I'd like to remind our listeners that this is the Good Neighbor Podcast, where we shine a light on the amazing people and businesses in our community. Thank you so much for tuning in today and a big thank you to Mike Juniak from Kitchen Tune-Up for sharing their story and expertise. Thank you, patricia, it's been great or call 205-952-0148.