5 Kitchen Upgrades That Are A Total Waste Of Cash, According To HGTV Stars

When home renovators give spaces upgrades that are unnecessary or simply undesirable, it creates a lot of waste: the old, working stuff that was removed and the money used to replace it. Part of a designer's job (even for an HGTV designer with assistants and location scouts) is to figure out what suits their client. And if the client has no use for something the designer loves — like custom cabinetry, overly expensive countertops, or matching metals — it's a waste.

The idea of wasting money is, of course, relative to how much money you have to spend. With a big enough budget and a real need, HGTV stars like Dave and Jenny Marrs are always happy to reconfigure a kitchen and install custom cabinets, and that's usually what they do. But if money is tight and custom cabinets aren't necessary, they would be a regrettable choice. Similarly, Christina Haack is more than willing to put a cooktop in an island or peninsula when it makes sense. And Hilary Farr ... well, she's probably not all that concerned about what the client wants, but she is happy to tell a client if they need hardwood floors. In the end, they all have budgets and would prefer to use them in ways that make sense. Waste is what happens when an opportunity cost is too high — in other words, when you make a costly bad decision for your kitchen.

New, epically expensive cabinets may just be the most unsatisfying kitchen upgrade when you don't really need them. And while Dave and Jenny Marrs are happy to install whatever custom cabinets are appropriate for a house and family, they've consistently taken a more frugal approach. Sometimes, all a kitchen needs are prefabricated, pre-finished cabinets, manufactured in standard sizes and with standard paint jobs. In Season 4, Episode 2 of "Fixer to Fabulous," they installed prefab cabinets for the renovation and used the remaining budget for structural improvements to the kitchen. They also built a custom island table. The point isn't that customization is bad — it's that unnecessary customization is wasteful.

Sometimes, the Marrses don't see the need for new cabinets at all, instead relying on paint and other upgrades. This is in keeping with their preservation ethic. "We love all of the details, the millwork, the unique angles, the original floors, what's hidden behind the walls. All of that good stuff is what we love and try to preserve," Jenny told House Digest in 2022. "[I]f you really love the color orange, paint the kitchen orange. It's your kitchen."

Jenny refers to the sparkly details of a kitchen as its jewelry and says that swapping out the hardware, lights, and fixtures in a kitchen — along with a fresh coat of paint — can dramatically change the space without a full-blown renovation. "Home Town" co-host Ben Napier agrees. "It's amazing what you can pull off with paint," he told Business Insider in 2020. "A lot of times the cabinets are fine, and they just need to be painted."

Ben Napier, half of the dynamic duo behind HGTV's hit show "Home Town," also thinks it's a bad idea to spend money upgrading your kitchen countertops if it costs more than you can afford. Why decimate your budget for granite or marble when less-expensive wood will do the trick? And wood almost always does the trick for Napier. "I'm a woodworker, and I love butcher block countertops," he told Today in 2020. There are, of course, both pros and cons of butcher block countertops, but they may work great in your kitchen.

The point isn't to always install butcher block, specifically, but to choose a material that works with your budget. In the Season 7 premier of "Home Town," Ben and Erin Napier experienced this with the new countertops for their getaway cottage. "We wanted soapstone, but our pocketbooks didn't want soapstone," Ben quipped. They happily settled on leathered granite, which looks very similar to soapstone, at what Erin estimated was 1/20th of the price.

Back in Season 3 of "Home Town," the Napiers' team installed laminate countertops in a starter home with a small renovation budget. Laminate countertops can give the impression of natural stone at a much lower price if you avoid a dated, rounded profile by using a squared edge or an edge eased with a bevel. "It's not even that it feels like real stone," Ben said. "To me, the curved edge has always felt very 1997 laminate." Laminate with a squared edge was right for the starter house, just as butcher block or leathered granite is right for other budgets.

If you're looking for things not to like, Hilary Farr has a suggestion: scratched and stained hardwood kitchen floors. Disliking abused floors is probably a universal, but Farr doesn't universally dislike hardwood, even in kitchens. Her issue is with paying more for a floor that doesn't wear well for families with children, pets, or busy lifestyles. In "Tough Love" Season 2, Episode 7, Farr insists on removing the hardwood from a kitchen that's being renovated. "The thing is, [the floors] really shouldn't be hardwood again. With their dogs and their lifestyle, hardwood is not the best solution," Farr said in the episode, adding, "Which works out for me, because I have an LVT that's gonna look great and cost half as much."

Luxury vinyl flooring is an attractive option and often includes upgrade opportunities to improve the variation in the floor's finish. It's extremely resistant to scratching and water damage, which is key in a busy kitchen. "You get all the beauty of it being natural wood. You get all the durability of it not being natural wood," Farr explained in the episode. "You can drop something on this, and it's not going to make a dent. You can spill things on it, you can wipe it up." Farr has also been known to use tile inlays in high-traffic areas of a kitchen hardwood floor, when the budget allows.

Ben Napier of "Home Town" shares this positive view of vinyl flooring. "It wears great," Ben told Today in 2020. "It has a really long life span, it's cheap, kidproof, waterproof, petproof, etc."

Erin Napier — the design mind behind "Home Town" — sees another unnecessary source of expense and stress in a kitchen: matching metals. Homeowners in the heat of renovation might be convinced that all their kitchen appliances should match, all of the cabinet and drawer pulls should match, and even the appliances and hardware should match. Erin Napier, however, says this is unnecessary and even undesirable. Writing about her own kitchen in her Laurel Mercantile blog, Napier says, "Don't be worried about matching all your metals. In our kitchen, I've got brushed brass, unlacquered brass, stainless steel, copper, and oil-rubbed bronze. All the metals work together to keep it feeling warm and not so boring and matched." She also used white oak pulls to match her cabinets, but that's about as much matching as she bothered with.

In 2012, before the Napiers got their HGTV show, Napier told the Hooked on Houses blog that many of the pulls and knobs in her kitchen were from New England pharmacies and schoolhouses via an architectural salvage store. "Some are copper, some are painted and chipping, and each one is my absolute favorite one," Napier wrote.

Mixed kitchen hardware has become a bit of a trend in recent years, and companies like Rocky Mountain Hardware champion the practice as an "element of good design." The trick is to make all of the hardware work for the kitchen's flow and maintain cohesiveness with complementing materials and contrasting finishes.

In Season 4, Episode 10 of "Christina on the Coast," Christina Haack does away with the kitchen's island entirely. Along the way, she agrees with the homeowners that it's not a good use of limited space and mentions that she thinks cooktops and ranges in islands can be dangerous. She ends up replacing the island with a peninsula, complete with seating for the whole family, and ditches the downdraft-vented cooktop in favor of a range and a sizable vent hood against a wall. But these aren't firm stances she's taking against either islands or the cooktops within them. Haack, by all accounts a fan of kitchen islands, is simply realistic about when a floor plan needs a peninsula, and she's equally cautious about making a cooktop too accessible and open in the middle of the kitchen.

Haack explains further in Season 5, Episode 9 of the show: "I always feel like islands like this, where they put the range in the middle, for little kids it's always so dangerous." Kids can reach the stovetop, and pops and splatters from the stovetop can reach them as they move through the room.

But Haack isn't always averse to open cooktops. In Season 2 of her show, she installed one in a peninsula for a couple that didn't have children and would likely use it to cook during social gatherings. After all, it's not about an island cooktop being a bad investment — it's just a bad idea for certain households. Always take care to choose the type of stove that goes best with your lifestyle.

Static Media owns and operates House Digest and Hunker.