How much does a kitchen renovation cost in Calgary?
Anywhere from about $20,000 to several hundred thousand, and the spread is that wide because the phrase covers completely different work.
What moves you along that line, roughly in the order it moves your budget: the cabinetry, the appliance package, the countertops, the tile and backsplash, the plumbing fixtures, the hardware and the lighting. Then the layout changes, because the moment a wall or a drain moves, drywall, paint, an electrician and a plumber join the project. Every one of those has a range wide enough to change your total on its own, which is why a kitchen cannot be priced by its size. We build cabinets in our own shop, offer Downsview Kitchens cabinetry, and sell some of the worlds top appliances, so we can walk you through a wide wide range of prices and show you the difference each one makes in our showroom. Walking through a showroom instead of just looking at a catalogue allows you to feel it rather than just see it in on a page or website. In a kitchen that you will use every day, that feeling of quality matters as much as how it looks.
What does a $200,000 kitchen in Calgary actually buy?
When people bring in their Pinterest board to show us what they like, it is usually of a kitchen on this tier. Take a kitchen at this level and roughly $80,000 of it is the custom cabinetry and roughly $60,000 is the appliance package. That is $150,000 before a single countertop, tile, handle, light or tap has been chosen. We have built kitchens where the cabinets on their own passed $100,000.
A kitchen at this level is bought by someone renovating the home they intend to live in for a long time. They realize the investment is worth more than any increased value on their home.
The comparison people reach for is a flat-pack kitchen from a big-box retailer, and the honest answer is that the two are different things rather than the same thing at different prices.
You feel it before you can explain it. A drawer in a big box kitchen shifts a little as it opens and lands with a rattle. A drawer built here moves on one plane and stops without a sound, because the sides of the cabinet are thick enough not to flex and the drawer is joined at its corners rather than stapled. Doors hang level and stay level, instead of drifting out of line over a few winters.
Then there is how long it stays that way. A flat-pack kitchen is generally built to look excellent for five to seven years. Then the dents, scratches, slammed drawers start to show their wear. The kitchens from our shop, are fifteen and twenty years old and still square, and all they need is a couple of quick door and drawer adjustments. Over that stretch the flat-pack kitchen has usually been replaced once, which is the part that never shows up in the cost comparison.
Why is the cost range for a kitchen renovation so wide?
Because people price a kitchen as cabinets and appliances, and a kitchen is a dozen separate decisions, each with a range of its own. Here is what each of those decisions looks like at either end, so you can work out where a quote in front of you actually sits.
| AT THE LOW END | AT THE HIGH END | |
| Cabinetry | Particle board, in set widths, with a handful of door styles and finishes | Built to your room from high quality materials, in the finish you chose, with inlays or specialty veneers, laid out around your lifestyle and how you actually cook |
| Appliances | Around $10,000. A freestanding stainless range, fridge and dishwasher from a mainstream brand | $60,000 and beyond. Refrigeration hidden behind your own cabinet fronts, a professional range, a built-in coffee machine, steam and warming drawers |
| Countertops | Laminate, or an entry-level quartz in a standard thickness with a square edge | Natural stone chosen off the slab, a mitred edge carrying down the side of the island, a matching backsplash cut from the same piece |
| Tile and backsplash | About $6 a square foot installed, laid straight | Up to $600 a square foot for a handmade water-jet mosaic, or $40 a square foot for large-format porcelain laid in a pattern |
| Plumbing fixtures | A mainstream tap and sink that work, but don’t add to the space | A tap that is part of why the kitchen looks the way it does, a workstation sink with the accessories that sit in it |
| Lighting | A mass-produced flush fitting from a big-box retailer, or whatever was already in the ceiling. It lights the room and adds nothing to it | Pendants over the island that people ask you about, lighting run under the upper cabinets so the counter is lit where you work, and inside glass-fronted cabinets that illuminate at night |
| Construction | Low end estimate of $20,000 even when nothing moves | Walls out, load bearing beams installed, windows enlarged, plumbing and electrical relocated, ceilings patched and repainted, all on top of required permits and engineering |
No two people weigh those rows the same way, and almost nobody buys every one of them at the same end. One client wants a professional range and a serious ventilation system and is perfectly happy with a straight-laid porcelain backsplash. Another puts a handmade mosaic behind a mid-range cooktop, because they love hosting far more than cooking on the stove. Someone else spends less on decorative details and puts it all into cabinetry that fits the room properly and how they use it, because the thing that bothers them is opening a drawer that sticks. Where you sit on each row is a set of decisions about how you actually live, and that’s what the design conversation is for.
There are a hundred choices you get to make in your kitchen renovation. A big question you need to ask yourself is whether the quote you are getting is based on the exact design and layout you want, with decisions you have actually made, or whether it is a rough estimate. A quote might come back priced at $4 a square foot for tile, purely as a filler to get a number to you fast and make it look attractive. Then you start shopping, you land on a $25 a square foot tile and you fall in love with it. The same thing happens with the appliances.
A quote built on a list of placeholders and a quote built on your design are describing different work. That is most of the spread you see between one published Calgary figure and another, and it is why the cheapest of them can be missing half of what you were picturing.
“People don’t think of it as the whole package, and we need to make sure they understand exactly what the quote includes.” Tracie Janke, our general manager
Does moving the layout cost as much as people think?
Not always. Removing a wall, enlarging a window, or turning the kitchen so it looks out into the room can often be done without moving the number as much as people brace for. It depends how far you want to go and the room you currently have.
What sets the number is whether load bearing walls, the appliances and the plumbing stay roughly where they are. Keep them and the kitchen is a refresh. The appliance package and the cabinetry decision set your budget, and construction stays small. Move them and construction joins the project. Drywall, painting, an electrician and a plumber all attach to the change, and each of them affects the other.
The permit follows the same line. The City of Calgary requires a building permit for an interior renovation when structural changes are made, which includes moving or removing walls on any floor or creating new openings, and does not require one for cosmetic upgrades and finishes. Separately, electrical and plumbing permits are required when a circuit or a plumbing system is extended or altered, and not when a fixture is swapped for another in the same place.
What is the difference between custom and mass-produced cabinets?
A lot of what you can’t see, but what you definitely feel when you are in the finished kitchen, and also what decides how long the kitchen lasts.
Wayne Reynolds, who runs our shop and started there as an installer twenty years ago, is straightforward about why cabinetry is so often the biggest line on a kitchen renovation quote. Everybody gathers in the kitchen. It is the most-used set of cabinets in the house, so everybody wants to get it right.
| MASS-PRODUCED | CUSTOM CABINETS | |
| Cabinet sides | Five-eighths of an inch, the industry norm | Three-quarters of an inch, thick enough that the cabinet stays square under weight |
| The back panel | Nailed on behind the cabinet | Built inside the cabinet, so the screw holding it to your wall passes through a back that cannot pull away over time |
| Joints | Screwed together from outside | Pinned and glued, with nothing screwed in from outside |
| Edges | Finished where you look, raw where you do not | Finished on every face, including the ones you only see with a shelf out |
| Sizes | Set widths, with trim pieces and caulk filling the gaps at the wall | Cut to your actual opening. Walls are rarely square, so if yours is wider at the top than the bottom, the frame is built to that shape |
| Doors | Whatever profiles and finishes the manufacturer offers that season, in the sizes they make | The style, colour, and finish you want, overlaying the frame or set flush inside it |
| Drawers | Stapled | Joined at the corners |
| Material | Particle board, which chips at the edges and swells if water gets into it | High quality materials, chosen for grain and finished to last. It can be sanded, refinished and lived with for decades |
What custom buys you, past the build, is choice. The material, the finish, the door style, and where every drawer and cupboard goes.
A kitchen built around you puts the cutlery beside the dishwasher, the spices within reach of the stove, and the bin where your hand already goes. You stop noticing it, which is the point. A kitchen built around a catalogue puts them where the standard boxes happened to land, and you notice that every day. The drawer that rattles when you close it. The sink two steps further from the fridge than it should be.
Wayne has been back on service calls to kitchens of ours that are fifteen and twenty years old and still look amazing. All they need is a couple of door and drawer adjustments, and he is happy to help.
How does the appliance package change the number?
What makes one package cost several times another is not just a brand. It is quality. At the upper end you are paying for compressors and ovens engineered to run for twenty years rather than seven, for refrigeration that sits flush in the cabinetry with your own door fronts on it to match the cabinetry rather than stainless steel, for ovens that hold a temperature precisely enough that the recipe behaves the way it is written.
Kristen Hodge, one of our senior designers, works through four things before she suggests a brand.
1. How often do you cook? This one does most of the work. It tells her how much of your budget belongs in the package rather than in the room around it.
2. How do you want refrigeration to look, and do shelf and drawer heights matter to you?
3. What is the aesthetic of the kitchen the package is going into, clean and contemporary or something more rustic with a range?
4. What do you already know? Which brands you have looked at, so the conversation starts where you are.
Where that lands, in her words:
– Sub-Zero and Wolf is the across-the-board choice for someone investing more and wanting it to be reliable. The widest range of products and cooktops, a strong warranty, and it lasts.
– Gaggenau is for the client who loves cooking and wants precision over the temperature. Fewer options, more specific. The chefs Kristen has worked with ask for it by name.
– Thermador sits just below those on price, with a star-shaped burner that puts out a lot of heat. Providing options for clients looking for different price points.
– La Cornue is two different answers depending on the series. The CornuFé and the Albertine are for someone who wants a showpiece from France in a colour nobody else has. The Château is for someone who genuinely loves the art of cooking, with more cooktop options and a curved oven roof that uses convection the old-world way.
Mixing brands across one kitchen is normal and Kristen specifies it regularly. The common pairing is Gaggenau for the cooking and Sub-Zero for the refrigeration, because Sub-Zero makes fridge and freezer drawers that are built into an island and cabinetry seamlessly.
We carry twelve brands and hold a direct dealership with every one of them.
What else moves the price, and by how much?
Everything that is not the cabinets or the appliances. The countertops, the tile and the backsplash, the taps and the sink, the handles, the lighting above the island and inside the cupboards. Individually none of them looks like a big decision. Together they are where a kitchen stops being a room and starts being yours, and they are also where two quotes for the same kitchen stop resembling each other.
Tile is a good illustration of how much these selections can change the price of your kitchen. Our showroom carries mosaic at $600 a square foot as a display piece rather than a backsplash you would price a kitchen around. Ordinary installed tile in Calgary runs from about $6 to $40 a square foot, so the decision between a straight-laid porcelain and a handmade mosaic can move a backsplash by a factor of ten.
The cost of tile is in the labour as much as the material. A water-jet mosaic is cut by machine and then laid by hand, piece by piece. Kristen visited Mosaique Surface, one of our tile suppliers in Quebec, and was enthralled watching six people sitting at a table assembling a single mosaic by hand.
“It’s more of an art form than just a simple backsplash,” is how she puts it, and her view is that clients who experienced seeing that table would understand the price without being told.
The countertops move the same way. Laminate, quartz and natural stone are three different prices for the same square footage, and a slab with a mitred edge that carries down the side of an island is a different job from a square-edged run against a wall.
The plumbing fixtures divide into fittings and features. A good tap that works well is one price. A tap that is part of why the kitchen looks the way it does is another.
Then the hardware and the lighting, which are the things that breath so much life and personality into your kitchen. Whether you select a statement light fixture to go over the island or lighting built into your cabinets to give them a soft warm glow.
What is in our quote that is not in a cheaper one?
A number built on what you actually chose, rather than on placeholders for things nobody has chosen yet. We design the kitchen first and price it second, which is the whole reason our quote can be specific, and it is what the next section is about.
Those placeholders are called allowances. Every quote written before the design exists needs them, because the tile, the appliances, the countertops and the hardware have not been selected. The size of each allowance is a choice the person quoting makes, and a small one makes the whole quote look attractive. You do not find out it was underquoted until you have chosen the tile you love.
| LINE ON THE QUOTE | TYPICAL LOW END ESTIMATE ALLOWANCE | WHAT YOU ACTUALLY END UP CHOOSING |
| Appliances | Basic appliance package | A package around $40,000 and up, with integrated refrigeration behind cabinet door fronts, selected based on what will work best for you |
| Tile and backsplash | $3 to $4 a square foot as an estimate before any selections have been made, which rarely end up being this price. | The $15 to $50 a square foot tile you decide you can’t live without in your kitchen |
| Cabinetry | Coated chipboard or a low-grade wood, in whatever standard sizes the boxes come in | The wood and finish you chose, cut to your room, with the inlay, the specialty veneer or the painted detail you picked |
| Countertops | A basic quartz | A higher end natural stone, with the edge detail you picked that will last for decades |
| Cabinet hardware and lighting | A round number as a ball park guess | The pieces you spent an afternoon choosing |
A firm willing to price a kitchen before it knows what is going in the kitchen will quote low, but when you inevitably select the backsplash you love, the appliances that work for you, your final cost will land around the same as a quote that has walked you through the selections first. You just get to be surprised by the number at the end of the project rather than select a kitchen you love that works within your budget at the start.
This is why we start with a design consultation rather than a number. We sit down, work out what you want the room to do, walk the showroom so you can put your hands on the actual tile and the actual door samples, and only then price it. The quote that comes out the other side is the price of the kitchen you chose, not an estimate of a kitchen nobody has designed yet. If you stood in the showroom and chose $50 tile, the quote carries $50 tile.
“I could tell you that it’s going to be less, and then you could get the surprises along the way, but we would just rather tell you up front.” Tracie Janke
How does the design retainer work, and why does it come first?
Because the design is what makes the number real, and the design is work.
Before we design your kitchen, we ask for a design retainer which delivers a defined list: two designs, one revision, pricing, and a site visit. It is credited in full against your final cabinet payment if you go ahead with us, which makes it a deposit on the kitchen rather than a fee for drawings. If you decide not to proceed, it covers the design time you received.
A retainer with a defined list and a clear next phase means you know what your kitchen renovation will cost, what you get for it, and a kitchen design that you love.
The design consultation is where common kitchen design mistakes get caught. Kristen has drawn hundreds of kitchens and can help you avoid common design mistakes such as:
1. Ventilation forgotten, particularly in an older home, where there may be nowhere obvious for it to go.
2. A built-in coffee machine installed too high to use comfortably, which you discover every single morning.
3. A cooking surface set too far from the sink, which you notice the first time you carry a pot of boiling pasta across the room.
Is your project a good fit for us?
We are the right fit for someone renovating the home they live in, who has likely been through a renovation before, and wants to invest in getting it right. It suits people who would rather be guided through six hundred decisions than handed a catalogue.
We work across Calgary and the surrounding area, and on projects further out across Western Canada. If you already have a builder or a designer you trust, we work alongside them. If you do not, you do not need to find one, because the designer, the cabinet shop and the installers are all here.
We have the showroom and the shop in the same building, with over a hundred years of combined experience behind the glass. You can stand at a sample table, change your mind about a door profile, and have it incorporated into your design. Our designers and cabinet makers work together closely to understand the vision beyond just a set of drawings.
Get a real number for your kitchen
Bring your inspiration photos and a sense of what you want to invest. We will design the kitchen around both, in a showroom where the cabinets are built through the glass behind you.
Common questions
Is it cheaper to keep the existing kitchen layout?
Yes. Keeping the appliances and plumbing roughly where they are keeps construction small, keeps the project away from needing a building permit in most cases, and leaves the cabinetry and the appliance package to set your number. Moving a wall costs less than most people expect, but it does add drywall, paint, an electrician and a plumber to the job.
Do I need a permit for a kitchen renovation in Calgary?
A building permit is required when a wall moves or comes out, on any floor. Trade permits are required when electrical circuits or plumbing are extended or altered, and not when a fixture is swapped for another in the same position. Finishes and cabinetry on their own need neither.
Do I buy the appliances through Empire or separately?
Through us. We carry twelve appliance brands and hold a direct dealership with each one, so the package is quoted, ordered, delivered and coordinated with the cabinetry rather than arriving on its own schedule.
How long does custom cabinetry take to build?
Allow 10 weeks or more from the date all details are approved. Lead times vary depending on the size and complexity of the project, current shop capacity, material availability, and whether cabinetry is produced in-house or through Downsview, which follows its own production schedule. As production schedules and material availability can change, actual timing may vary. We’ll confirm the anticipated timeline with you as your project moves into production.
Why does one kitchen quote come in $20,000 lower than another?
Usually allowances. A quote written before the design exists carries placeholders for the appliances, the tile, the countertops and the hardware, and the size of each placeholder is a choice. A $10,000 appliance allowance against a $42,000 package, or $3 a square foot tile against the $20 to $50 tile you liked, is most of a $20,000 gap before anyone has built anything.
Does Alberta having no provincial sales tax make a kitchen renovation cheaper?
Yes, by five per cent against most of Canada. Alberta charges the five per cent federal GST and no provincial sales tax, so a kitchen renovation here carries five per cent tax rather than the twelve to fifteen per cent common elsewhere.
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