What a kitchen remodel actually costs in St. Louis

The honest answer is that a kitchen in St. Louis costs between about $34,000 and $115,000, and that range is so wide it is almost useless on its own. What is useful is knowing which decisions move you from one end of it to the other. There are five, and they are not the ones most people worry about.

1. Whether a wall moves

This is the single biggest fork in the road. A kitchen that keeps its footprint, its plumbing and its appliance locations is a finish project: cabinets, counters, floor, paint, lighting. A kitchen where a wall comes out becomes a structural project with an engineer, a beam, a permit, a temporary support wall and a week of framing before anything pretty happens.

In practice, taking out a load-bearing wall in a typical St. Louis home adds somewhere between $9,000 and $22,000 to the job once you count engineering, the beam, the labor to set it, the drywall repair on both sides and the flooring that now has to be woven across the old wall line. It is frequently worth it. It is never free, and any bid that treats it as a small item has not thought about it.

2. Cabinet construction

Cabinetry is usually 30 to 40 percent of a kitchen budget, and there are three broad tiers. Stock cabinets come in fixed sizes, typically 3 inch increments, and filler strips make up the difference. Semi-custom lets you change dimensions, door styles and finishes within a manufacturer's system. Full custom means a shop builds boxes to your exact wall, which in a hundred-year-old house that is three-quarters of an inch out of square is sometimes the only way to get a clean result.

• Stock: roughly $180 to $320 per linear foot installed
• Semi-custom: roughly $380 to $650 per linear foot installed
• Full custom painted inset: roughly $700 to $1,300 per linear foot installed

Those are sample figures for planning, not quotes. The spread between the top and bottom of a 32 foot kitchen is over $30,000, which is why cabinetry is the first conversation we have about budget.

3. What the electrical panel can carry

A lot of older St. Louis homes still have 100 amp service, and some still have fuses. A modern kitchen wants a dedicated circuit for the range, another for the oven if it is separate, one for the microwave, one for the dishwasher, one for the disposal, two small-appliance circuits on the counters and usually something for the island. That is eight or nine circuits in a panel that may have two spaces left.

A service upgrade to 200 amps typically runs $3,500 to $6,500 around here depending on the meter location and whether the utility has to do anything at the pole. It is not a kitchen expense in the emotional sense, but it is a kitchen expense in the real one.

4. Counter material and the number of seams

Quartz and granite in the mid range run roughly $65 to $110 per installed square foot. Quartzite, marble and the high-end porcelain slabs run $110 to $220. The material is only part of it: a mitred waterfall edge on an island is a fabrication detail that can add $1,500 to $3,000 by itself, and a kitchen that needs three slabs instead of two because of a grain match is a real cost difference.

5. What is under the old cabinets

Nobody budgets for this and everybody finds it. Under a run of 1958 cabinets there is usually no finished floor, sometimes a patch of vinyl asbestos tile, and occasionally a section of subfloor that has been wet for thirty years. If your new layout differs from the old one at all, the floor has to be made continuous, and that means either weaving new material into the existing floor or replacing the whole room.

So what should I budget?

If you are planning and you do not have a design yet, these are the bands we see most often in St. Louis for a kitchen between 120 and 300 square feet:

• $34,000 to $52,000: same footprint, semi-custom cabinets, quartz counters, new floor, lighting and paint
• $55,000 to $80,000: minor layout changes, island added, panel upgrade, better appliances, upgraded stone
• $85,000 to $115,000: wall removed with a structural beam, full custom cabinetry, premium stone and appliance package

Those are sample ranges for illustration. Your actual proposal comes from a site visit and a scope document, and the only number that means anything is the one attached to a signed line-item scope.

The most expensive kitchen is the one you price twice: once optimistically, and once for real after demolition.

How to compare two bids honestly

Put the two scope documents side by side and look for three things. First, the allowances: a bid with a $4,000 tile allowance and a bid with a $9,000 tile allowance are not the same bid, even if the bottom line matches. Second, what is excluded: painting, flooring, appliance install and electrical upgrades are the usual omissions. Third, who does the work: a bid built entirely on subcontractors with no named project manager will cost you in schedule even when it saves you on paper.

If you want a fixed-price scope for your own kitchen, we will walk it with you and give you a written range within three business days.