Jeremy and Holly Redman bought a Midcentury house in Los Angeles last year. The kitchen looked cheap and dated, so they set a $60,000 budget to redo it. Four months later the plan covered the kitchen, dining area, laundry room and entryway, with custom cabinets, a built-in banquette, slate floors and green soapstone counters. The cost was roughly $180,000. Jeremy says he couldn’t have paid the last two invoices without selling his company. “We were the frog that got slowly boiled,” he told the Journal.
Ben Kesslen’s story in Friday’s Mansion section walks through how it happened, line by line. The cabinets were supposed to cost $7,000. A real-estate agent had even suggested IKEA. Custom plywood with their designer came to $44,200, more than two-thirds of the whole original kitchen budget. Once they’d gone custom, the extras were hard to refuse. Wrapping the windows in wood added $2,150 and the refrigerator $3,200, on a line that was budgeted at zero. The banquette and chairs were planned at $5,000 and landed at $11,690. The one line in the Journal’s box that came in under budget was the counter stools, thrifted and reupholstered for $900 instead of $2,000.
Why custom costs more now
It isn’t only the Redmans. Rising labor costs, shifting tariffs and shipping delays, including the gridlock in the Strait of Hormuz, have pushed custom prices up and lead times out. Alex Segal runs Croft House, a Los Angeles custom maker. Since 2019 he’s paid 47% more for cabinet hinges, 105% more for brass handles and 124% more for metal ones. Labor hurt most. Even American-made furniture leans on imported fabric, fasteners and frames. A designer in New York priced oak built-in shelves for a client at around $12,000 after lumber jumped. She switched to pine and composite, painted to match the wall, and saved about $4,000. Paige Wassel, who designed the Redmans’ kitchen, says she’s seeing a wave of clients in the middle, with real money but not all-custom money. For the Redmans’ table, she rebuilt a vintage Herman Miller base from Facebook Marketplace with a new local top for roughly $3,000.
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This is Cash Flow, M5, and the frog line is the whole lesson. Nobody decides to triple a budget. They decide to add wood around the refrigerator. Renovation budgets creep one small yes at a time, and custom work makes each yes feel small next to the last one. The Redmans love the kitchen and don’t regret it, and they also had a company to sell. Most households don’t. You don’t have to skip the project. You do have to set the ceiling, and a contingency, before the first custom choice. A contingency is money set aside for the surprises. Then price every add-on as its own line with its own yes.
Your check this week is the home-project line in your own cash-flow plan, whether it’s a kitchen, a bathroom or built-in shelves. Write the ceiling number down, add a contingency on top, and put the pair where the whole household can see them. If a project’s already underway, lay the invoices next to the original estimate the way the Journal’s box does, and see which lines moved. And don’t promise anyone a move-in date on a custom piece this year. Lead times are the other thing that’s grown. If the project is big enough to touch your savings or a home-equity line, bring the estimate to a review first. It’s a lot easier to say no at $7,000 than at $44,200.