We're doing our in sections. Flooring was the second item tackled... then retackled 2 weeks ago.

If your cabinets have the flooring going under them (some do, some don't), then it becomes harder to do it in sections.

We did not have the flooring going under the original, built in place cabinets.

I know the history of the house and remodels since I bought it from my parents 9 years ago. They bought it when it was 18 months old in 1966.

The flooring was always pretty low end. Originally it was a gray tile - with asbestos. (Yikes) There was a fire in 1969, and the floor was replaced with a yellow (harvest gold?) sheet vinyl, then in the late 80's with a white sheet vinyl. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the wrong adhesive was used and we had ugly black stains leaching through the white vinyl.

Our house did *not* have finished flooring under the cabinets or dishwasher. When we first put in ceramic tile, we pulled out the dishwasher to put tile underneath. That was in an earlier phase of the remodel (2 years ago?). The current phase involves pulling out the cooktop and cabinets on one side - and putting in a free standing range with custom cabinets on either side. (Custom as in my husband is building them from scratch.) We put tile under where the range is just 2 weeks ago. We bought enough extra tile, originally, to account for this.

If you're building new, it makes total sense to put flooring under everything first. But when you're remodeling in phases - you work with what you have.

an idea: i did not remodel in sections but phased the work and purchases, which may be a way to accomplish the same thing.

it became clear pretty early on that i would need to do some creative planning to do my kitchen remodel once i tallied up my spreadsheet of estimated costs - budget did not match estimate! i did the following, hope this helps:

broke major construction work into 2 phases:

-phase 1 replace hot water heater with tankless in sub-basement and disconnect from old flue and reconnect to new vent on side of house (required to get rid of flue going up original kitchen cabinet), replace galvanized plumbing for copper under house. GC did this work 6 months before the actual kitchen demo work, allowed me to save money for next phase and to test out the firm to be sure i liked using them. also allowed me to take advantage of government tax rebates going on at the time.

-then I did the cabinet design and purchased cabinets over a span of apprx 4 months. this again allowed me to save and use out of pocket money as opposed to taking out of savings. it also allowed cabinets to be built in advance so they were ready to go on day 1 of demo. i had them stored in a bonus room of garage. they were delivered in march, demo for kitchen did not start until may, so i had another 3 months to save $.

i shopped at scratch and dent sales, bought my stove ~ 1 yr before construction and stored in garage. paid out of pocket as opposed to savings.

you get the idea... it took longer to do but allowed me to pay as i went, only had to use 10K out of savings account, the rest was pay as i went.

think it will be hard to do just pieces of your kitchen at a time due to mess and debris. you may want to consider this alternative...

Our hardwood is under the cabinets so eventually it will all hve to come out when we replace most of the flooring in the house.

We're planning to get all the wiring, rough in plumbing, 2 new windows done before most of the kitchen becomes inoperable. This would involve moving the frig to another location and loosing 10' of countertop, that isn't very well utilized now. We figured we could demolish most of the kitchen but keep the pennisula that currently houses the range and sink until we absolutely necessary. We'll have hardwood floors professionally done and then assemble the kitchen into it's new configuration.

In our last remodel, most of the areas stayed relatively the same. The pennisula though we totally reconfigured. We placed wood to come up to the same height as the hardwood flooring where we had no flooring (under previous walls). That worked well and we only were w/o a full functioning kitchen for about 2-3 days. I can't say it looked pretty during that time, but it did function.

My hats off to those that completely gut there kitchen all at once. I couldn't handle having my kitchen out of commission for that long. Of course we're not the fastest DIY around.

It's like pulling off a bandaid. If you go quick and rip it off, it doesn't hurt as much as going slowly and trying to unstick the stuck hair one at a time.

Sure, the budget can't often handle everything you want done at once, but the key to making it work isn't splitting the kitchen down the middle and tackling one half at a time. The key is to adding up the tasks and splitting those into handleable chunks. The reason most people end up demoing the whole thing it it is a ton easier to be able to add the electrical that you will need to upgrade as well as to do any proposed plumbing upgrades/changes. It's a LOT harder and messier to do all of that with cabinets and walls in place.

Start your assessment at the systems that will need to be changed. Can your current electrical service handle the loads that a modern kitchen will demand of it? If you have to go to a 200 amp panel from a 100 amp panel, do that first. The same with your plumbing. Are there old galvanized water supply pipes that are just waiting on you to touch them before they disintegrate? Put that on the list.

Flooring can be done last, but you need to account for it's overall height in the design. That means putting the equivalent height plywood under the cabinets. You can live on a sealed subfloor for quite a while after you rip out the current flooring. The same with the cabinets. You can live with Ikea boxes with no doors and plywood counters for quite a while until your custom made doors come in or the granite that you want can be better afforded.

The thing to remember is that you don't want to have to do a job twice. So that makes planning things out even more critical.