FHA 203K Loans Explained: Part 2 | Can You Finance A Kitchen Remodel?

Found the perfect house in the perfect location, but the kitchen needs a complete makeover? Don’t let an outdated kitchen stop you from buying a home with great potential. In this episode, we explore how to completely renovate an old kitchen, from removing outdated cabinets, countertops, sinks, flooring, and lighting to redesigning the layout, adding new appliances, installing modern cabinets, and creating the kitchen of your dreams. We also discuss opening up kitchens and dining rooms, understanding load-bearing walls, replacing damaged subflooring, improving kitchen functionality, and why a kitchen renovation can be one of the best improvements you can make to a home. If you’re buying an older home, planning a kitchen remodel, or wondering how to transform an outdated kitchen into a beautiful, functional space, this video will help you envision the possibilities.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to All Things Home Loans, Credit, and Real Estate. I'm your host, Deb, the mortgage queen. So let's start learning. Found the perfect house in the perfect location, but you don't want anything to do with the kitchen. And I want you to just kind of envision this with me. Think about standing in a kitchen and it was back in the 70s and 80s when they had the lighting that was these huge fluorescent lights right in the middle of the room. And they were fine. They lit up everything fine, but the actual things, the grids that are in those fluorescent lights, are yellowed because they have so much grease on them. Oh, even better yet, there's dead flies inside those little grids, and you have to take it all apart for you to be able to get all the dead flies out. Nobody wants that. That lighting fixture, gone. We can get rid of that. How about the kitchen cabinets? They are the old oak, and maybe they're okay. They're also covered in grease and they just need to be just ripped out and start over. And maybe the functionality of the kitchen, you don't like it. You don't like this size, this cupboard on the side of the sink, you'd like a little bit bigger. And you'd really like this cupboard over here, a little bit smaller for your spices. And maybe you want to shift your oven just a little bit. Maybe you want to shift your kitchen sink just a little bit. Maybe whoever installed it didn't center the kitchen sink in the window. And you have to have that fixed. So think about I can take out the whole cabinet, the uppers, the bases, all of that out. How about the kitchen sink? No, you don't have to keep the kitchen sink. You can get a new kitchen sink. The dual sinks that are right there, and maybe it's the old cast iron, and you look at it, you're thinking, I can't get this thing clean. It's disgusting. There's chips in it, and there's scuff marks from people putting whatever in the sink that just nastied up that sink. Take it out. Let's get it out. Let's put you get a better one in. How about this? Is my favorite. When they did the four by four or the six by six little ceramic tiles on the countertops. And then they grouted those lines. Can you only imagine how many germs are in those? Well, I just don't think that you should ever have any type of grout lines on a kitchen counter where chicken juice and things like that are up. We can rip that all out. Think about the floor coverings. How much is on a floor of just nastiness and be just nice to have a clean slate? Same thing. Maybe it's a tile floor with grout and you want to get rid of that. It's too cold, it's too hard. Maybe you want to put a hardwood floor in. Maybe you want to put a laminate flooring in. Maybe you want to put the tile floor that looks like a hardwood floor. Maybe it has grout lines still, but you know, that's your choice. How about all new fixtures? I want to put a pot filler in. I want to put a brand new stainless steel sink in. I want to put those kitchen cabinets back as a naughty maple, a naughty hickory. Maybe I liked the oak look, but maybe I want to update the style of the cabinet door. Maybe I want to change the color so it's not such a golden color. Maybe I want to have black cabinets. Maybe I want to put Vermica countertops on because I like Formica. Maybe I want to put granite countertops on because I like granite. Maybe I want a whole new stove. Maybe I want to double a double oven. Maybe I need a whole new fridge. Maybe I need to relocate my fridge. All of that stuff can happen. So when you walk into a house that looks really good for you location-wise, the bones of the house are good, everything else is good. You just need a very solid kitchen because that's your favorite place to hang out. Envision it down to the sheetrock. Completely down to the sheetrock. You can have your mind just build that kitchen back exactly how you want it to be. Go to a kitchen design website and you can plop out the area of that kitchen and let your imagination just wander. Some of those old kitchens, they made like a U-shape. And on the other side of that U was the dining room. Maybe you don't want that U-shape. Maybe you want it to be extended out a little bit more and less cabinets and you just open up that ability to just get right into your dining room. Maybe it is already that way and you want to have a U shape, so you can just make a U-shape out of those new cabinets. That is definitely something that you can do on your own imaginary thoughts there. The thing that we have to remember is if we're ripping out walls, now I do know that in some of those older homes, the kitchen and the dining rooms were separated. I really don't know why, but they were separated. If that wall between the kitchen and the dining room that's there is considered a bearing wall, we can't remove it. Any walls that are considered bearing walls that are actually helping carry the roof, those cannot be removed. But in the event that it's just there for the sake of keeping the separation from the kitchen to the dining room, we can take that out. And that does not have to stay. So you have the ability to open that kitchen and that dining room up and just get that open concept back. Even if the small footprint of the house is small, you have the ability to open that up. So you have to think more cosmetic. And really, just because you take a sledgehammer to kitchen cabinets and you're destroying all of those and you're taking some of the floor coverings out, that doesn't mean that that is just cosmetic. Don't overthink it. It is cosmetic. When you expose that floor and there is uh some significant spills or significant damage to that uh subfloor that's underneath, if we need to replace two or three of those subfloor boards, we can. Sometimes in the kitchens, there are some extra spills that go on in there. And it is helpful to have the smells better if we can get some of that subfloor out and replaced. And really, it doesn't cost very much to throw in two or three new pieces of subfloor, and it will actually help just the smell itself, more than likely, if you get an old subfloor removed. The kitchen is probably your biggest, in my opinion, this is my opinion, it is your biggest improvement to a home to help the value the most. My opinion only. I'm not an appraiser, I'm not a real estate agent. But you go into a house and you renovate that kitchen and you put $20,000 into a kitchen. I'm not saying you're gonna get dollar for dollar back out of that, but the ability to have your value increase because you renovated the kitchen is pretty likely. That's a good place to focus extra money. Also, you want your kitchen to be functional. Most people who uh love to cook and love to bake, they need the kitchen set up a certain way for them to be able to be successful uh in their kitchen. So let that kitchen just take your imagination in many places. Take it down to the wall. In your mind, rip out the cabinets, rip out the nasty countertops, rip out the kitchen sink, rip out the dishwasher, rip out the stove, rip out the fridge. You have four walls. Now put those four walls back together how you want it to be. Your kitchen is not the only room that we can renovate. Next week we're gonna talk about the bathroom. How do we get that bathroom also down to the sheetrock walls and rebuild it to a bathroom of your dreams? Because everybody wants a bathroom of their dreams, right? All right, so subscribe, share this, and uh let's head to the bathroom next. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. So stay tuned. We are gonna learn some more next time.