Kitchen Remodeling in Huntingdon Valley PA: What It Costs and What to Expect from a Local Contractor

By Kanstantsin Bychak, Owner, Evolution 12 General Contractor

Our shop is in Huntingdon Valley, so the kitchens I am about to describe are the ones I see every week. If you live here or in Abington, Jenkintown, Rockledge, or Willow Grove, there is a good chance your kitchen looks a lot like the ones we tear out year after year. This post is the straight version of what a kitchen remodel actually costs in this area, what we find once the work starts, and how to keep your project from stalling. No fluff. Just what 25 years of doing this work has taught me.

The kitchens we keep finding in Huntingdon Valley homes

Most of the homes around here were built in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and a lot of the kitchens are still close to the original. We pull out oak cabinetry, dark cherry cabinets, and a lot of that heavy 80s-style cabinet work all the time. By now most of it is aged and falling apart. The hinges sag, the finishes are worn, and the layout was never great to begin with.

The bigger problem is almost always the layout itself. These older kitchens tend to be boxed in with walls on all four sides and a single way in and out. They feel crowded and tight. The appliances from that era took up a lot of room and gave you very little in return. It was a closed-off design that fought you every time you tried to cook or move around. A lot of homes in Huntingdon Valley, Glenside, and Elkins Park still have that exact footprint, untouched since the day they were built.

What homeowners actually want now

The story repeats itself, and it is a good one. Homeowners want the walls gone. We see it many times every year. People take out the closed-in U-shaped kitchen and open the space up. The most common move is to go to a single longer run of cabinets and counters, then add an island or a peninsula. That one change does more for an old house than almost anything else. The kitchen goes from a cramped box to the center of the home, and suddenly the whole first floor feels bigger.

If that is the project you are picturing, you are in the majority. It is the single most requested kitchen in the older neighborhoods we work in.

What a kitchen remodel costs in Huntingdon Valley

Here is the part everyone wants, with the honest ranges. Treat each of these as a range on purpose, because cabinet choice, layout changes, and what we find behind the walls all move the final number.

Bare minimum, starting around $20,000. This is a very small kitchen on a tight budget with basic everything, the bare minimum on labor and materials. It gets you a functional, updated kitchen, but you are not doing custom work and you are not moving walls. For a small footprint that just needs to be brought current, this tier is realistic.

A solid mid-grade kitchen, $30,000 to $50,000. This is where most good projects land. You get mid-grade cabinetry and a genuinely better layout, the kind of result most homeowners are happy living with for years. What pushes you toward the top of this range is the scope of the cabinetry and how much you change the layout.

Custom, high-end, or large, $50,000 and up. Once you move into custom cabinetry, premium materials, or a big footprint, you are past $50,000. We have done kitchens that reached $80,000, $90,000, even $100,000. The size of the space, the level of finish, and how much we are reworking the structure are what carry a kitchen into that territory. We have built across the whole spectrum, so the right number depends entirely on what you want.

If financing any of this is on your mind, the smart move is to sort that out before you ever get an estimate, so you walk in knowing your budget ceiling. I wrote a separate guide on how remodel financing works that is worth reading first.

Why we almost always do a full gut

People sometimes ask if we can just swap the cabinets or just redo the counters. The honest answer is that we very rarely do that. We never do counters alone, and we almost never do cabinets alone. The typical project for us is a full gut renovation, everything brand new.

There is a good reason for it. When we take a kitchen down to the studs, sometimes including the subfloor, we redo the plumbing and the electrical along with it. In a house that is 40, 50, or 60 years old, that is not over-engineering. It is the only way to know the kitchen you are paying for will hold up. Doing it piecemeal in an old home usually means paying twice when the old systems fail behind your brand-new cabinets. A full gut done once is the cheaper path over time.

What we find behind the walls

Every old kitchen has surprises, and in this area a few of them show up again and again. I tell homeowners to expect them so the budget conversation is honest from the start.

Old wiring is basically a given. When you open up a kitchen from this era, you assume the electrical needs work, and it usually does. Old plumbing is the same story and often needs to be redone. We also run into mold that has to be remediated, which you cannot see until the walls are open. And there is almost always something structural in the way of the new design, like a soffit dropping down from the ceiling hiding HVAC ducts, or a plumbing drain stack that has to be adjusted to make the new open layout work.

None of this means a project has gone wrong. It means the house is old, which you already knew. The contractors who pretend these things will not come up are the ones whose customers get blindsided by a change order. I would rather tell you now.

Permits, and the mistake that stalls projects

Permits depend entirely on the township. Some offices here turn them around quickly and some are slow, and because every project is different I will not pretend to quote you an exact timeline. What I can tell you is the mistake that wrecks schedules.

People get their estimates, start the work, and only then realize they needed a permit. The township finds out, comes by, and issues a stop work order. Now the project sits for weeks while everything gets sorted, and every deadline you had is blown. I have seen it happen, and it is completely avoidable.

The fix is simple. Talk through permits with your contractor before any work begins, and pull them as early as you can. A good contractor handles this with you from the start. If you are remodeling in Lower Moreland Township, Abington Township, or any of the surrounding municipalities, get the permit question answered up front and you take the single most common cause of delay off the table.

How long a kitchen takes

Timeline comes down to scope. A smaller, simpler project we can sometimes be in and out of in about a week. The bigger custom jobs, the full guts with structural and layout changes, have run us three, four, five, even six weeks. When you get your estimate, ask for a realistic schedule for your specific scope, not a generic promise. The honest contractor will give you a range and explain what could stretch it.

Why work with a contractor based right here

Being down the road matters more than people think. We know the homes in Huntingdon Valley, Abington, and Jenkintown because we are in them constantly, and that means fewer surprises and faster answers when something comes up. We are fully licensed in Pennsylvania (License #PA164463) and carry $2 million in general liability coverage, both of which you should verify on any contractor before you sign. Over the years we have completed more than 580 home remodels and over 3,200 jobs. That experience is exactly why the cost ranges and the warnings in this post are specific instead of generic.

Ready to talk about your kitchen?

Get a free on-site estimate. We respond within 24 hours. We will walk your kitchen, tell you honestly which tier your project falls into, and flag the likely surprises before they become change orders. Whether you are in Huntingdon Valley, Abington, Jenkintown, Willow Grove, Rockledge, or Glenside, the work is the same: open it up, do it right, and do it once.