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⭐DIY Budget-Friendly KITCHEN MAKEOVER- How I saved THOUSANDS!

Jun 05, 2021
In this episode of Designed for Nines, I'll walk you through the process of taking our

kitchen

from what it looked like when we bought the house to what it looks like now and how I

saved

money doing it myself along the way, so Get Started So I'm going to Address up front that while I classify this

kitchen

as a small kitchen having worked in the design industry, I know it's not the smallest kitchen on the planet, but it's still smaller and there's really a lack of storage throughout our home. because it was built as a vacation rental, so storage is not necessary when you travel, but since this is our primary residence, we have some storage issues, so I'll address some of that later when I get to the decorating part , but I wanted to start from where we started and this is what it looked like when we bought the house, it was pretty simple, rather bland, what we had were these butter yellow walls.
diy budget friendly kitchen makeover  how i saved thousands
We had some beautiful ebony cabinets and granite countertops that we really loved, so we had some good bones to start with, but I wanted to take it up a notch and get it out of that builder grade status, and that's what we've done. . The first thing we did was paint the walls, the paint was really bad throughout the house and there are still some areas I haven't addressed yet when you build multiple houses at once which is what you do in these masses. communities they go with as the highest bidder, use the cheapest paint and just get it, and that's what I was dealing with, it's just a really poor paint job.
diy budget friendly kitchen makeover  how i saved thousands

More Interesting Facts About,

diy budget friendly kitchen makeover how i saved thousands...

I didn't love the color, it was like butter yellow. which I didn't like very much, although I chose something neutral, but it has a little more depth and I chose Revere Pewter on the wall... I found this to be a really good neutral color. that can go with a lot of different palettes it's a little bit gray it's a little bit beige it's somewhere in the middle and so it really complements a lot of different color schemes one thing you can really do to enhance a kitchen and make it feel like a little more polished is to add a splash guard.
diy budget friendly kitchen makeover  how i saved thousands
I have made subway tile backsplashes in some of my homes and have even used pegboard as a backsplash and this time I wanted to do something a little different and here's why, first of all, I felt like this was a very of construction and I wouldn't love the kind of gold colored granite countertops...I mean, they're not the worst...they're just not what I would have selected if I had started from scratch, but the house is only a few years old and I felt it would be a waste to replace it. Would you have ripped out the granite?
diy budget friendly kitchen makeover  how i saved thousands
Let me know if you would have ripped out the granite and started from scratch. I wanted to bring in the brightness of a white kitchen so I knew I wanted to do a white tile in some way but I wanted to do something a little different than a subway tile backsplash and then I came across this tile which is kind of arabesque. tile with a tan or gold tone, it is a very pretty tile and what I really liked is that I felt like it brightened up my kitchen and the gold brought out the gold on the countertops and it all worked together and really kind of brightened up the kitchen and the I customized it in a beautiful way and ended up installing the tiles myself and I will briefly explain how I did it.
I started by removing the existing six inch granite backsplash so I can have a more seamless and uninterrupted look from top to bottom now I used a heat gun to help but you may still have some damage to the drywall like me, so try to be as careful as possible to minimize this, it's not the end of the world. It will just add a little time to our project, then we removed any remaining residue on the countertops with a flat edge blade, so I patched the walls, let it dry overnight so it was nice and sturdy, then sanded it to smooth it out.
Also, I sanded the top where it was painted and then started on the most challenging area, which was the raised bar that drops down to the high area of ​​the regular counter. This was particularly tricky because there was also a rounded tip and the tile has a unique shape. To begin with, if this had been done as a subway tile or a square tile it would have been much simpler, but due to the unique shape of our tile along with the rounded tip and then the drop, it made it particularly challenging, but we He did it!
We then unscrewed all the plugs and making sure they had no power, you can get a bit of a buzz if you're not careful! Working with a wet saw isn't as scary as you think, you just need to be very aware and very careful, make sure you cover your eyes with goggles and wear a mask and if the noise gets to you, earplugs aren't a bad thing. idea. we just made all our cuts and then we applied the tiles to the wall using the white caulk, not the gray material. The gray material I found will fall off the wall much easier and is much harder to clean...which is why I like the white caulk for this application.
Once the tile is installed, you let it sit for about 24 hours and then go back and apply the grout making sure to wipe off all the excess. And when it's dry there will be a little haze, go back and polish the tiles with some window cleaner and a flat edge blade if necessary. Now this tile really dressed up the kitchen and took it from builder grade to gourmet! So this was kind of an abbreviated version of how I went about tiling the backsplash. If you want a full tutorial on how I installed this tile, I will link all the full tutorials in the description box below, honestly, with the tile backsplash.
Like granite countertops now because everything works together...what do you think? Now, right in front of the kitchen, I have this large wall where I added some board and bat trim and molding. I started by removing the baseboards and outlet covers, then covered the entire wall with masonite, an extremely affordable type of plywood. I did this so I could create a smooth finish on my Florida walls with a lot of texture. Now you could definitely apply a thin coat to your walls, but I found this technique to be much faster and gave me fantastic results! Once I cover the walls with masonite, my goal is to cover most of the seams with board and batten, but there was one seam that I still needed to fill with joint compound and smooth...then I put them all in.
My molding followed the pattern which I had predetermined and used a nail gun to do it quickly... you know, I love my power tools, it just makes me feel so powerful! Next, you'll fill the nail holes, sand them smooth, and caulk all the joints to make sure they're tight. You can't skip these steps as this is what really gives you that professional feel. So all I needed was some primer and paint. I love this and it really ups the ante a lot and renting molding and trim can be very expensive but adding molding and molding can really add a more luxurious and high end feel and we did it for next to nothing now if you watch my video on decorating mistakes , you know I talk about the fact that it's okay to take time to decorate a room, that's how you save more money and that way you make really good decisions after time and kids and cooking and all that kind of stuff. things, my cabinets started to look really dirty, really gross, really worn out and I thought maybe I'll have to paint them after all, but if you saw it in my last episode, I show you how to refinish your cabinets so they're like new.
Condition without having to sand or paint them now. If you want to paint your cabinets, do it! I love beautiful painted cabinets, but I'm not at the point where I'm ready to do that yet, so I decided to refinish the cabinet, which was actually a deep cleaning of the cabinets with a special brush that worked great before. You start, you must first remove all the hardware and connect the special brush to a drill and that's it. I covered this in more detail in last week's episode and talked about all the specific types of cleansers and products I used. and it really worked well now, after scrubbing thoroughly I used a cabinet cream to seal and re-gloss the cabinets and wiped it down with a microfiber cloth, then we had to deal with all the nicks and wear. areas on the cabinet and I used a special trick to do that on my ebony cabinets.
I also took the opportunity to add new brass hardware to the cabinets, giving it a more contemporary and upgraded feel. When all was said and done, the transformation was impressive. In fact, I ended up looking even better than when we bought the place. I'm so glad I did this and now look at them and they look amazing, I like them and I didn't have to paint them after all, saving me a lot of time and definitely a lot of money, so now that we've painted the walls, added molding, refinished our cabinets, We added tile, we changed the hardware for something more beautiful, now it's time to decorate and do fun things, but if you have a small kitchen, you know. that decoration is not completely just for aesthetics, you need some functionality because many times the things that you would store in a larger kitchen, like a mixer, for example, have to be visible because you simply do not have the space to store them, so Next we are going to decorate our kitchen taking into account aesthetics and functionality.
In an ideal world, I would have a big, beautiful pantry (#goals), but I don't, so I take this little area and rotate it. this on my toasting station and add a basket to hold our phones as it is also a charging station, and place beautiful jadeite plates that I collect that hold my butter and sugar but look pretty enough to display now in the future. I may make some covers for these appliances, but for the most part this corner is hidden out of sight, so it made more sense to use it this way, so here's a little more of that jadeite color; it's not actually jadeite but we're I'm going to start on the right side of the stove over here and when you're decorating a small kitchen sometimes things need to do double duty so this is a scale it's functional and it works and it just I have some fake lemons.
It's here right now, but a lot of times I take some real lemons and throw them on top of the fake lemons. You can't tell the difference, so we'll keep them here. Super cute! Sometimes when you're decorating a small space, you don't have a lot of cabinet space and you're also using a lot of these things all the time, so I have things like my olive oil, my apple cider vinegar, and my cooking sprays. as well as my utensils that I use a lot of the time, so instead of scattering them on the counter, you get a nice trash basket or you can use a wooden box like I've done here and put them all in one place and then place it very close to where you're cooking so it's convenient for you and it's all ready to go and it looks a little less chaotic, so I like that and I might put some kind of fun vinyl on it too.
Then, who knows? Just a couple of final accessories to finish this off is that I have a cute little honey jar that you can put real honey in. I still don't feel guilty...but it would actually be a functional but beautiful piece if I have to use something, it could also be a pretty container so it would be perfect to put my honey in and then just a little topiary to add a little interest and make it look a little less functional and a little more designed. and that will fill out this area when you're working in a small space, suddenly the space at the top of the refrigerator becomes very important, but instead of lining a bunch of stuff and cluttering the space, what I found actually works. great is to put some nice containers or decorative baskets up there, so in my case I have these, I've had them for a while and I just put snacks and chips and stuff in these containers so they don't take up space in the cabinet and they don't it looks ugly on top of my refrigerator so we have it functional but cute so that's a good tip on how to store things on top of your refrigerator without it looking messy so now let's work on the left. side of my stove and make this functional but attractive.
The way to do it is again by mixing some stylistic and functional things, so I bought this pedestal at a thrift store for two dollars, as you can see, and it will be a perfect place to display some of our functional but beautiful items as well, so I like to put this right next to the stove and in the back I have some different flavored balsamic vinegars that we use a lot that I'm just going to put on. Those right here and to add a little bit more height and some greenery, we're going to add like a little sprig of greenery there.same and then I have other vegetation.
I probably bought this at TJ Maxx or Ross for a very cheap price. You see all of these. over the place and I'm going to stick that in here and then again these are some antique jadeite salt and pepper shakers so we're going to place them close to where you're cooking and this is also a functional timer, normally I would try to avoid putting my mixer on the counter, but I use it a lot and I don't really have a place to store it, so it goes on the counter, so we have this tall awkward space right here and I'm going to get to that here in just a second, but first I want to talk about grouping similar things together, so I have a couple of cutting boards so instead of scattering them all over the room again you want to group them together and add a little bit of interest with different heights so what I like to do is put this one upright and that one little bit of height, so I'm going to put this one a little bit long so that you have an L shape and then I put this one in here and then to add a little bit of greenery and life to a room because I think greenery adds a lot of life to the room.
Now I kill potted plants, so usually mine are silk...or fake...they're not real, but they still give a little life even though they're fake, so we'll just hide them. which at the time I have this topiary tree that I bought on clearance at a TJ Maxx, our home that was about to close and then we're just going to put it in the corner and balance that space and then I have a clock that we're going to hang here so that let's know what time it is for beautification purposes I got at Ross on clearance for about 16 so one of our last little areas is I just have a The paper towel holder here is simple but I need it all the time so I leave it out and then over here I took a little cupcake stand that I bought at Hobby lobby on clearance for two dollars and I put just a little plant in it. in a terra cotta pot and then of course I always have the vintage candles from my candle company burning right here because they smell amazing now that this is the fall harvest.
I'm telling you, it's amazing if you could take fall and put it on a candle. With all the delicious scents, that's what you get from this vintage candle company. I love their candles, their scents are really rich and they smell so good I have never been disappointed with any of the scents so I really highly recommend them and if you want to find out more about the vintage candle company I will put a link for them on description box below, so I'm taking advantage of this area here by placing one of these. I do not know what it is called.
It's like a rod. It has hooks so we can store things and we are simply going to put it there, it will be a decorative element as well as functional. I bought it at Hobby lobby. It was originally $17.99 (US), but I think it's 40% off. It cost about $10 all said and done and I spray painted the finials this brass color to mimic some of the other brass features I have in my kitchen, from the handles to the backsplash and everything we're going to do . is just centering this here and drilling some screws so now that we have this in place we can use these hooks if we don't need all of them we can remove some of them but I bought this basket on Amazon and I'll put the link below but I thought first of all we could take the tag hook off that basket, but I thought we could put fruit or something in there, so it'll look really cute like this, but I have something that I've been trying to find a place for that I bought on clearance from Michael's for twelve dollars and it's this giant guy, I don't know if it's like a pizza board or a cutting board that has some lettering on it, I thought it would look really cute hidden behind here and then what am I going to do to hang this because I don't think it will hang well up here, so I want it to be that way. hidden behind, so since I didn't have a D ring on hand, a little trick for you is to remove the lid from a soda can and screw it to what you want to hang and you have a perfect hook to hang on. a nail or a screw talk about a great piece of junk to hoard while I'm still dreaming of my beautiful bright and airy white farmhouse style kitchen, in the meantime I'm very happy with the end result here, I think it's beautiful, I think it's elegant and timeless. modern and contemporary, functional and aesthetic, you can't go wrong, plus I

saved

thousands

and

thousands

of dollars doing it myself, taking my time to make smart decisions and what more could you ask for? and it's a perfect kitchen for now... if you enjoyed this episode here's another one that I think you'll like too and until next time to all my DIY Niners, goodbye!

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