Short answer
The most common kitchen remodel regrets are structural, not cosmetic: aisles that are too narrow, an undersized or unvented range hood, too few outlets, and a lighting plan that puts your shadow on the cutting board. All four are cheap to get right during planning and expensive to change afterward.
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1. Making the aisle too narrow to get the island in
This is the most frequent one. Someone wants an island badly enough to accept a 30-inch aisle, and then lives with it.
The rule: **36 inches minimum** on every working side of an island, **42–48 inches** if two people cook or if a dishwasher door swings into that aisle. Below 36 inches, you can't open the dishwasher and stand at the sink at the same time.
If the room won't hold an island at those clearances, a peninsula does most of the same work and only needs clearance on two sides.
**Fix it during planning:** tape the island footprint and the aisles on your actual floor. Stand in it. Open a cabinet door.
2. Undersizing the range hood — or not ducting it outside
A recirculating hood with a charcoal filter removes some grease and no moisture and no combustion byproducts. In Seattle's climate, where the house is closed up most of the year, that moisture goes into your cabinets and drywall.
What to hold to:
- **Duct it outside.** Always, if the run is remotely possible.
- **The hood should be at least as wide as the cooktop** — wider is better, since rising plume spreads.
- **Rough sizing:** roughly 100 CFM per linear foot of range for a wall-mounted hood; an island hood needs meaningfully more because there are no side walls to contain the plume.
- **A high-CFM hood needs makeup air.** Above roughly 400 CFM, code generally requires a makeup air provision — pulling that much air out of a tight house depressurizes it and can backdraft other appliances.
**Fix it during planning:** decide the hood before the cabinets, because the duct route has to clear the joists.
3. Not enough outlets, in the wrong places
Everyone underestimates this. Small appliances multiply. Code requires receptacles at certain spacing along counters, but code minimum is not a design.
What to add beyond minimum:
- An outlet inside the pantry cabinet for the appliances you don't want on the counter
- Receptacles in the island — required by code, and the placement is a design decision, not an afterthought
- USB-C outlets where people actually sit
- A dedicated circuit for the microwave, and another for the dishwasher
- Under-cabinet lighting on its own switch
**Fix it during planning:** walk the electrician through the kitchen with your appliance list before rough-in.
4. Lighting the aisle instead of the counter
Ceiling cans centered in the walkway put you between the light and your work. You chop in your own shadow.
Three layers:
1. **Under-cabinet task lighting** on every run with an upper over it. This is the single highest-value lighting decision in a kitchen.
2. **Ceiling fixtures positioned over the front edge of the counter,** not the middle of the aisle.
3. **Ambient or decorative** — pendants, a fixture over the table — for everything else.
Colour temperature: 2700K–3000K reads warm and matches most Seattle homes. Mixing temperatures across the three layers looks wrong and is hard to diagnose after the fact.
5. Choosing cabinets before deciding the layout
Cabinet selection is the fun part, so people start there. But layout determines what cabinets you need — and in an older Seattle house that's out of square, layout determines whether stock boxes will fit at all without a run of filler strips.
Sequence that works: measure → establish what's bearing and where the plumbing is → set the layout → select cabinetry → select finishes.
6. Skipping the things behind the walls while they're open
The walls are open exactly once. This is the cheapest moment in the life of the house to do any of it:
- **Insulate exterior walls.** Many pre-1960 Seattle homes have nothing in them.
- **Replace galvanized supply lines** you can see.
- **Remove knob-and-tube** in the work area.
- **Add a dedicated circuit or two** for future appliances.
- **Block for a future grab bar** or a heavy shelf.
- **Run conduit** to wherever you might want power later.
Every one of these is a few hundred dollars now and a wall demolition later.
7. Buying the cheapest hardware
Drawer slides and hinges are what you touch a hundred times a day. Undermount soft-close slides with a full-extension rating and a solid weight capacity cost modestly more than the base option across a whole kitchen, and they are the difference between drawers that still run true in ten years and drawers that sag.
Same for the faucet. A cheap faucet's cartridge fails, and replacing it means getting under the sink.
The seven, ranked by cost to fix later
