What do we ask when we first walk through your kitchen?

Short answer

Most of what we ask has nothing to do with style. We want the age of the house, where the drain leaves the room, what is left in the electrical panel, who cooks and how, and who else must approve the work before it starts. Every one of those answers moves either the price or the calendar.

A first visit takes about an hour, and a good part of it happens with a flashlight, under the sink and inside the cabinet next to the range. The answers that change a number are almost always hidden from view. We work in Saugus, California, in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Take this list with you when other contractors come to look. Anyone who prices your kitchen without asking most of it is guessing, and that guess is corrected later, on your invoice.

Questions about the house

How old is the house?: Age predicts what is inside the walls. Galvanized supply line, cloth wiring, a vent that was legal once and is not now: any of those turns a cabinet swap into a plumbing or electrical job, and it is better found with a flashlight than during demolition.
Where does the drain leave the room?: A sink moves a few feet cheaply and a long way expensively. What decides it is the run of the waste line and how much fall is left in it before the stack. On a slab, moving the sink means cutting concrete. Over a crawl space it can be rerouted from below at lower cost. Moving walls and plumbing covers both.
Is there room in the panel?: A new kitchen needs circuits the old one never had, and a full panel means a subpanel or a service upgrade ahead of everything else. We count the open slots and read the main breaker on the first visit, because discovering this in week two is expensive.
Is anything upstairs above this ceiling?: A bathroom overhead changes the ceiling plan, because its drain and its vent may run exactly where the recessed lights were planned. It also changes the working day. A stack that serves the rest of the house cannot sit open overnight.
Is the wall you want gone holding anything up?: We look at which way the joists run and whether the wall sits over a beam or a footing. A bearing wall is not out of the question. It brings a beam, posts and an engineer's stamp, and all three belong on the estimate you sign, not in a change order two months later.

Worth knowing. Santa Clarita exempts countertops, tile, flooring and cabinets under eight feet from a building permit, then says in the same section that plumbing, electrical and mechanical permits are still required for those items unless separately exempted. Read the city's exemption list.

Easier to answer with the cabinets open in front of us.

Ask for a price

Questions about how you live

What annoys you daily about this room?: The most useful question we ask, and the one most people answer with a style word, which is worth pushing past. "I cannot open the dishwasher and the oven at the same time" changes the drawing. "I want it brighter" changes nothing until we know whether you mean daylight, task light or the color of the wall behind the sink.
Who cooks, and how?: One person who bakes needs a different counter run and different outlets than two people cooking dinner together every night. Counter height, which drawer holds the pans, which side the trash pull sits on: those are set by this answer rather than by a catalog.
How long can you live without a kitchen?: A house with a toddler has a different tolerance than a couple who already eat out most nights. The answer decides whether we phase the work or set up a temporary sink and a hot plate somewhere else in the house. Our range is nine to twelve weeks, built from the makers' own published lead times rather than from a promise, and how long it takes explains what extends it.
What is the figure you do not want to pass?: We ask for the limit, not the ideal. It tells us whether to price around keeping the cabinet boxes or to start from an empty room. For scale, the 2025 Los Angeles remodeling benchmark puts a minor remodel that keeps the boxes at $29,765 and a midrange major remodel at $86,214. Those are metro figures for one fixed 200 square foot kitchen, not a quote from us.

Questions about permission

Two more, and they are the ones most often forgotten until work is about to start.

Is there an association?: Architectural review can add weeks before a single cabinet is ordered, and some associations also set work hours, where the dumpster sits and what the front of the house may look like while the job runs. We want that settled at the start, not on the day demolition begins.
Who is responsible for the permits?: The city's Building and Safety office puts that on the property owner, before a building is repaired or altered. We do the filing and we meet the inspector, and you should hear that stated plainly by anyone bidding your kitchen, then read it again in the contract. Work that was never permitted counts as well, and who pays for that is its own note. Permits and inspections covers the order in which it happens.

The inside of a sink base cabinet showing the P trap, two shutoff valves and where the drain enters the wall

A flashlight beam inside the cabinet under a sink, showing the trap, the two shutoff valves and the point where the drain enters the wall.

One question to ask us back

Ask who is licensed to do which part of the job, and ask for names. California lifted the exemption for small unlicensed work from $500 to $1,000 in January 2025, but it holds only where the job needs no permit of any kind and the person doing it employs nobody, as the licensing board lays out. A kitchen with a dishwasher, a disposal and new circuits fails both of those tests before any cabinet is installed, so licensed and insured trades are the only sensible answer. A contractor who avoids the question is not the one to hire.

Do I need answers ready before you come?

No. Most of these we answer ourselves with a tape, a flashlight and a look inside the panel. The two worth thinking about beforehand are what annoys you daily and the figure you do not want to pass, because nobody else can answer those for you.

What if I have no idea where the drain runs?

Almost nobody does, and it is our job to find out. We look under the sink, at the cleanout outside, and at how the room sits over the slab or the crawl space, then tell you what moving the sink would cost before you commit to a layout that requires it.

Bring this list to whoever you hire

Read the answers back afterward. A contractor who has been in the panel and under the sink answers with specifics, and one who has not answers in generalities.

Ask for a price

Kitchen Remodel Saugus, CA. We build kitchens in Saugus and the surrounding Santa Clarita Valley. Licensed and insured trades on every job.

Saugus, California · (661) 430-7779

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