Every year we get the same call in the second week of November. Someone is hosting, the kitchen has bothered her since March, and she wants to know whether anything can be done in time. Sometimes the answer is yes. Often it is not, and the reason has almost nothing to do with how long the work itself takes. Here is how the calendar actually runs, so you can decide in October instead of finding out in November.

The part nobody accounts for

When people picture a kitchen project they picture the crew in the house. That is the short part. The long part happens before anyone shows up, and it is mostly waiting on doors.

Your door and drawer fronts are not pulled off a shelf. They are made to order, to your sizes, in your species and your finish. That is the reason they fit and the reason they match, and it is also the reason the calendar works backward from a manufacturing lead time rather than forward from your phone call.

So the sequence is: consultation, then measuring and a plan you approve, then the order goes in, then the fronts get built and finished, then they arrive, then we install. The install is the visible part and the smallest slice of the whole thing.

Mid-install. The old fronts are off and the boxes are staying. This is the part of the calendar people picture, and it is the shortest part of it.

Working backward from the table

Set the date you want to be finished. Not the date you want us to start, the date you want to be done and cleaned up, which for most people is a few days before they host rather than the morning of.

From that date, work back through four blocks:

1. A buffer at the end. Not because we expect a problem, but because you do not want the last day of the project to be the day the relatives arrive. Give yourself a week you do not strictly need.
2. The install itself. The crew is in your home, the kitchen stays usable for most of it, and the work runs in a defined window rather than trailing for months.
3. Manufacturing and delivery of the fronts. The block that surprises people. This is out of our hands and it is the reason October matters.
4. Design, measuring and approval. Selections have to be settled before anything is ordered, because once a custom door is cut to your size it is yours.

Add those together and you can see why a call in mid-November is usually a January project. Not because anybody is slow, but because you cannot compress a manufacturing lead time by wanting to.

Why October is the decision month, not November

Two things collide in the fall in St. Louis. It is the tail of our busiest season, and it is the stretch where everybody who has been thinking about their kitchen since spring finally calls. We keep our project load deliberately limited so that an owner is involved in every job, which is good for the work and does mean the calendar fills.

If you are reading this in the first half of October, you are in good shape. If you are reading it in November, the honest conversation is about January, and January is a genuinely good month to do this. The house is quiet again, nobody is hosting, and you are not trying to run a project around a holiday.

What you can decide right now, in ten minutes

You do not need to have chosen a door style or a color to start the clock. You need three things:

• Whether the layout stays. If the answer is yes, and it usually is, you are in cabinet territory and not remodel territory, and the timeline above applies.
• Roughly what you want to spend. A planning range is enough. Refresh projects are typically $12,000 to $18,000, Signature projects $15,000 to $30,000, and Custom projects $25,000 to $50,000 and up.
• Four photos. Each wall of cabinets and one wide shot of the room.

Those are general planning ranges only, not project quotes. Kitchen size, materials, construction requirements, modifications and selected options can all significantly affect the final investment.

Finished and back in service. The goal is not to be working in your kitchen the week you need it. It is to have forgotten we were ever there.

If the date does not work, what we will tell you

We would rather turn down a project than take one we cannot finish on the timeline you actually need. If you call in November wanting to host, we will say so, and we will usually offer you the January slot instead. That is not us being unhelpful. A kitchen half-finished on the day you are hosting is worse than a dated kitchen that works.

There is also a middle path worth knowing about. If the real problem is that the kitchen is embarrassing rather than broken, some of what bothers you can often be handled quickly: hardware, a light rail, a single storage fix in the cabinet that drives you mad. It is not a transformation. It is enough to get through the holiday, and it comes off the list for the bigger project in January.