Budget Red and Blue Kitchen Makeover

Home Decorating:

This is the little kitchen in our guest cottage. This makeover was definitely budget - basically as cheap as they come!

These before photos show just how LOVELY the kitchen was before I started fixing it up.

This is a basic list of what I did to this room to make it look heaps better!

• Huge amounts of cleaning
• Huge amounts of no-gapping
• Painted all the walls and ceiling
• I painted the floor the same way that I did for the other rooms in this house
• Our builder very kindly gave us some leftover tiles he had to do the splashback and we also did the top of the bench with leftover floor tiles. I also added a ‘H’ and a ‘C’ above the appropriate taps

• I took off all the doors of the top cupboards, to open the room up a bit
• I took out the ill-fitting drawers and instead sewed a curtain to go in the middle of the bottom cupboards

• I changed the handles of all the cupboards
• I added a shelf above the stove to break up that wall a bit
• I added a little cabinet that I’d bought from the Salvos for $15 at the end of the benches.

• And then I decorated the room with lots of things that I already had! I was especially pleased to be able to use all my lovely blue and white things in this room. They look so good next to the red

It’s a very functional little kitchen and is certainly a MAJOR improvement on what it originally looked like!

Hope you are enjoying any makeovers that you’re doing at your place!

Emma

A Low-Cost Kitchen Makeover!

Home Decorating:

Whenever anybody is doing a home renovation, they ususally say that they had a budget that they had to work to..... but I think that the best challenge is when you REALLY mean that and you have to do your renovation or makeover for a very small amount of money. My kitchen makeover was one such example!

The kitchen is well set out as it was (the house was built in the early 1980s)... lucky for that, because I had no money for any ripping out of cupboards! This is a summary of how I achieved the changes that you can see below:

1. I gave the whole kitchen a very good clean!!

2. I took off all the top cupboard doors so that the room looked more open and modern.

3. I painted the cupboards white using an enamel-based paint. I used white because it is a relatively small kitchen and I wanted to make it look bigger.

4. I painted the benchtops white using White Knight Laminate Paint. The back of the paint tin says not to use it for benchtops, but I have found it to be fine. Re-painting your benchtops once every couple of years is certainly cheaper than putting new ones on!

5. I did have to purchase a new rangehood (but I just bought the cheapest one), and I did have to get a builder to install the rangehood and a flue to the outside. All necessary work though, and it has made the kitchen much cleaner.

6. I changed the door handles

7. I bought a new light fitting and had that installed by an electrician.

8. While the builder was installing the flue, I asked him to put up some plywood at the end of one of the cabinets (he just stuck it over the top), and I painted it with blackboard paint.

9. Then I just added a magazine rack from IKEA, some stools, and decorated the kitchen nicely!

I love the result!!

The kitchen 'before'. Please note that I had already taken off the top cabinet doors before I took this photo!

The kitchen 'after'!

Happy decorating!

Emma