Your kitchen should be a place of joy and comfort, as it is the heart of the home. Many people don’t have a lot of money to invest in a new kitchen right now due to the economy we’re in. I have a house that was built in 1964 with flat panel cabinet doors and hinges running through the middle of the door.
Transforming this kitchen was a lot cheaper and a lot easier than I thought. The first thing I did was think about what I wanted to achieve in this kitchen, I wanted a bright space that my family would enjoy. I didn’t want to put in a new kitchen because I didn’t want to spend the money on the kitchen of my dreams.
I removed all the cabinet doors and removed the soffits from the upper kitchen cabinets, removing the soffits and the big black hinges made a huge difference in the room update. I took a palm sander and sanded the front of the doors and the back of the doors, also sanded the inside of the cabinets and then used mineral spirits to clean the cabinets. The next part of the process was to install crown molding along the top of the upper cabinets, then I took a bead board and applied it to the sides of the kitchen cabinets and added other thin molding to the cabinets where there were blemishes.
My next goal was to modernize these doors in some way, I took a small picture frame molding and measured about two inches from the edge of the entire wall around the door. I measured the space inside the frame and cut a piece of bead board to fit inside that space, it gave the door a very different look.
I also removed the old countertop which was an ugly dark green and there was a peninsula sticking out in the middle of the floor. I removed part of the peninsula and created an island out of it by adding furniture legs, bead board, and painting it chocolate brown to offset the lighter color on the cabinets.
I sprayed Benjamin Moore’s cabinets and doors simply white, using his impervo paint. It is a white, but not a boring bright white, very nice when everything went well. I gave the cabinets a primer coat and a finish coat, the impervo paint is self-leveling so minor imperfections are gone.
I added chrome hardware to the doors and hinges, the hinges are now hidden not in the middle of the door like the old hinges. I bought a new countertop with Formica that looks like granite, not the standard Formica you would see at Home Depot, but an upgraded version.
After painting the cabinets and installing the new counter, I bought new stainless steel appliances and installed wood floors in the kitchen. The end result is absolutely beautiful, I took this very boring kitchen that no one wanted to spend time in and made it the best room in the house.
I had to do a lot of research for some of the projects, but the cost was minimal compared to having a contractor do the work.
