Now this was a great thread to revive -- love all the pics!!
We paid over six figures. We bought an old house, where the kitchen was in an enclosed porch shaped like an L that was also the back entrance to the house. We had a gorgeous backyard, but the back wall was floor-to-ceiling dark oak cabinets, with one small window. And all the appliances were in the short side of the L, so you couldn't open the fridge or oven at the same time as the dishwasher -- and forget about two people trying to cook and clean up at the same time. Oh, and the formica countertop corners were held together by masking tape, and there were about 2 linear feet of counter space.
We flipped the kitchen into the small living room next to it, installed windows all along the outside of the L, and turned the corner of the L into a breakfast nook. It was NOT cheap -- turns out the enclosed porch was basically held together by popsicle sticks (like, they had closed off window openings just by shoving in whatever lengths of lumber they had at whatever angle they needed to to make it fit). But we had intentionally bought a house well below our max price, knowing we'd need to do the kitchen, so it wasn't unexpected.
What was unexpected was the while-you're-at-it-ism. We had another enclosed porch above the old kitchen, which we decided would make a great main bath. But that required moving the laundry room, which required finishing a porch halfway up the stairwell. And then we changed an unnecessary first-floor bath into a half-bath with two big closets, fitted out a small room as an office, and removed a weird built-in/closet thing in the upstairs hall, reopened the door into the hall bath, closed off the door between that bath and the main bedroom, and redid that hall bathroom upstairs while we were at it.
The whole thing was probably $250K. I did all the design, including kitchen drawings and specs, so we at least saved a little there. My ideal would have been for DH to build the cabinets, but we just didn't have time for that, so he focused instead on things like a coffered ceiling in the dining room and building the table and benches to fit in the breakfast nook. I freaked out at the cost at the time, but it turned out to be 100% worth it -- it's been an incredibly comfortable house for the past 20 years. Until it burned down. But I think the best evidence of how well the remodel worked was that we rebuilt everything exactly as it was (we did replace the fireplace with wine storage and open up the entrance to the dining room as part of the rebuild, but all of that was beyond the scope of the original remodel).
We paid part cash, part HELOC; I'd have preferred cash, but we'd just put 20% down on the house, so cash reserves were somewhat light.
Turns out I don't have good pics of either remodel, but I'm attaching one of the current kitchen.
