Kitchen Remodeling in Chicago, IL

Each service below has its own page, and most Chicago projects run several of them at once.

The worry is rarely the tile. It is the crew that vanishes for two weeks and the price that drifts.

That is exactly what homeowners hire HQ Kitchen Remodel to prevent. Since 2015 we've completed more than 350 projects and built up 360 reviews along the way. We are licensed and insured, and we work to a written scope agreed before demolition starts.

You get a named point of contact for the whole job. Changes are priced and approved before we build them. We are just as honest about the slow weeks, including the stretch while a fabricator cuts your stone or the city reviews a permit.

Chicago's housing stock is not one thing. Two-flats and three-flats make up the majority of housing in neighborhoods like Logan Square and Bridgeport, each unit a full floor behind a brick or greystone facade. Further out, the bungalow belt runs through Portage Park, Jefferson Park, and Beverly, mostly brick and built in the 1910s and 1920s. Closer to the center, Pilsen and Ukrainian Village still hold smaller workers' cottages that predate the bungalow wave.

All of it sits on the same narrow city lot, and that shapes the job more than the building's age does. A wall shared with the unit next door is a party wall with its own fire-rating rules — you cannot take it down just because it looks structural. Plaster over wood lath comes down in sheets, and cast iron stacks and older wiring are common finds once a wall opens.

Permitting is genuinely different here than in the suburbs. The City of Chicago runs its own Department of Buildings, separate from any suburb's building department. Structural, plumbing, or electrical changes go through the city's own plan review, which commonly runs about seven to nine weeks for kitchen and bath projects. A like-for-like swap, with no wall, drain, or circuit moving, usually skips that review. If your kitchen sits inside a condo or co-op, the association typically has to approve the work too.

Demolition day tells the truth about a building. Here is what we meet most often in the city's older kitchens.

• Knob-and-tube or ungrounded wiring feeding a counter that now needs three dedicated circuits.
• Cast iron waste lines shared with the unit above or below in a two-flat, which limits where a sink can move.
• Plaster on wood lath, which cracks in sheets the moment a soffit comes down.
• A party wall where an owner hoped for an opening, which changes the scope entirely.
• A soaked subfloor under the sink, usually traced to a supply line that had been dripping for years.
• Original hardwood running beneath the old cabinet run, which changes the flooring plan.

Anything we find becomes a priced change order, photos included, before we touch it.