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 are in. I have a house that was built in 1964 with flat panel cabinet doors and the hinges going across the middle of the door.

Transforming this kitchen was much cheaper and much easier than I thought it would be. 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 install a new kitchen because I didn’t want to spend the money on my dream kitchen.

I took out all the cabinet doors and removed the soffits from the upper cabinets in the kitchen, removing the soffits and large black hinges made a big difference in the room renovation. I took a palm sander and sanded the front of the doors and the back of the doors, I 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 tops of the upper cabinets, then I took some bead board and applied it to the sides of the kitchen cabinets and added other thin trim on the cabinets where there was imperfections.

My next goal was to modernize these doors in some way, I took a small 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 counter top which was an ugly dark green color 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, adding furniture legs, bead board, and painting it chocolate brown to offset the lighter color of the cabinets.

I sprayed the Benjamin Moore cabinets and doors simply white, using their impervo paint. It’s a white but not a boring bright white, very pretty when it all comes together. I gave the cabinets a primer coat and a finish coat, the impervo paint is self leveling so minor blemishes are gone.

I added chrome hardware to the doors and hinges, the hinges are now hidden, not halfway up the door like the old hinges. I bought a new countertop with Formica that looks like granite, not the standard Formica you’d see at Home Depot, but an upgraded version.

After painting the cabinets and installing the new counter, I purchased new stainless steel appliances and installed hardwood 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 turned it into 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.