How I Transformed My Kitchen for Under $800 - Part 1
Our kitchen is one of the spaces I am most proud of in our home. Over the past year, we have transformed it from an outdated, early-90s looking space, to a fresh and modern one with some of my signature happy colors. The best part: it didn’t cost us a ton of money to make a big impact.
We do not have the budget right now to completely gut and redo our kitchen. It’s something we are hoping to save up for and do eventually, but in the meantime I had to make this space more our style so that I could live with it for the time being. Enter paint and a lot of elbow grease.
When we moved into the house, we had every room painted Agreeable Gray by Sherwin Williams. The change in wall color alone made a world of difference, but there were other things we felt needed to be improved as well.
This is the dining table nook off of the kitchen as it looked when we bought the house, with the previous owner’s furniture. After we changed the color and added furniture and a rug we already owned, the original light fixture really stood out. I decided I had to change it, and found the BEST light fixture to make a statement and add some fun. We had a coupon and I watched sales until it was around $300 and I then bought it. Sometimes stalking your favorite online retailers for a while pays off! Here is the dining nook after we painted the walls, moved in our furniture, and replaced the light fixture.
1) Light Fixture 2) Similar Dining Table 3) Similar Chairs 4) Similar Rug 5) Similar Artwork
When we purchased our house, the rest of the kitchen had some good bones, but it wasn’t really our style. The cabinets are the original builder-grade ones from when the house was constructed in 1991. The previous owners had updated the countertops with a gorgeous granite, and they put in a larger island than was there previously. The kitchen also had a giant bank of cabinets that completely obstructed the view from the family room into the kitchen space. Here are some photos from the real estate listing:
My husband is really tall and immediately hated the cabinets. Within the first few months of living in this house, we realized the upper cabinets had to go. Not only did they block the view to the family room, but poor Matt hit his head on the corner all the time. When we moved in, we purposely left the upper cabinets empty. We wanted to make sure we could live without the storage space before we took them down. After a few months, we didn’t need the cabinet space, and so we formed a plan to rip them out.
I think Matt had a lot of fun taking out his anger on these puppies while removing them. Once we ripped down the cabinets, he looked up into the soffit to see if we could remove it completely. It turns out that whoever built this house put a TON of electrical wiring in the soffit instead of running it up the wall. So, due to budget constraints, we couldn’t take out the entire soffit as we had hoped. Still, just removing the cabinets opened up the space a lot, and definitely made an improvement.
After we got the cabinets down, my husband set to repairing the wall and smoothing out the bottom of the soffit. He did many thin coats of joint compound followed by a ton of sanding. It took forever and there was a LOT of dust, but it was worth it. We had a gallon of basic ceiling paint that we used to roll the bottom of the soffit, and then we retouched the gray paint on the side wall.
My husband realized he could easily tie into the existing electrical wiring in the soffit to add some can lights over the sink. We went and purchased this kit at Lowes. We bought 3 of them for less than $60, and Matt used his electrical engineering know-how to install them. He used a little hand saw to cut the holes into the drywall using a size guide that came with the lights. We just measured the soffit and divided by four to get the center point for each light. Then he turned off the circuit breaker and used this tool to make sure none of the electrical wiring was live. Lowe’s has an excellent tutorial to teach you the basics of how to change a light fixture if you’ve never done it before.
Once the lights were up, I wanted to add a place to display some fun accessories on the now blank wall where the cabinet originally attached. I found these shelves at West Elm, and we had a coupon we received in the mail when we moved. We ordered 2, 3-foot shelves for around $200. They came with very clear installation instructions and were pretty easy to mount to the wall. We ended up having to shim them a bit to make them level, but I’m really happy with how they turned out!
So here is where I will leave you with the halfway point of our kitchen makeover. Hanging a new chandelier, taking out the upper cabinets, adding the can lights, and mounting the floating shelves really opened up the space. These four things totaled roughly $560, which is a pretty good value for the impact made. I have to give my husband a major shout out for being the main labor force behind these changes. Next, I’ll show you how I completed the transformation by painting the cabinets. I had to get rid of the original orangey 90s woodgrain! Stay tuned!
