How We Flipped and “Renovated” Our Kitchen for $500

Happy Monday fam! We had a *more* relaxing weekend than we’ve had the last few weeks. If you’ve been following on the ‘gram, we’ve been busy working away on the house! We managed to effectively “flip” our kitchen. We painted the walls and cabinets plus swapped out all the hardware and, to be honest, it looks like a completely different kitchen. Plus it cost us just about $500 – yeah! No joke!

I got a TON of messages about the reno process! What we did, our paint colors, supplies we got etc! I’m breaking it all down (with Kev’s help, haha!) below. Because we’re newbie homeowners, and this is the first home blog post I’m writing (yay! more to come!), I didn’t get the best before photos but did manage to snap a few I included below.

We just finished decorating the living room and will be working on my office + the guest bedroom starting this weekend. I know we’re not the only ones focusing on house projects during this quarantine period! I hope you guys are finding projects to keep you busy & enjoying time to just RELAX. Like I mentioned, make sure you’re taking time to rest. We never get enough and if there’s any time for a few lazy days, it’s now! Plus every retailer is having massive sales lol. So relax and indulge in some retail therapy – haha!

HOW WE RENOVATED OUR KITCHEN

**quick disclaimer: prepping will take you just as long if not longer than painting will. You want to make sure you clean and sand the cabinets well or else the primer/paint will not go on properly. Also, we did paint the walls of the kitchen the normal – primer then a coat of paint way (Benjamin Moore Snowbound is our shade) – I’ll save the explanation since I figure we all know how to paint a room!**

1. PICK YOUR SUPPLIES!
   • PAINT/PRIMER: We needed paint & primer specific for cabinets (ask the peeps at Home Depot for help! You can call your local store to avoid going in & order for curbside pick up!)
   • HARDWARE: We picked up these packs of hardware (pulls & hinges), which were more affordable! We LOVE them, and they were super easy to install! Measure beforehand to ensure you get the right size and COUNT the number you need! lol, we ended up with too many pulls and not enough hinges.
   • TOOLS: make sure you have a powerful drill – we learned this the hard way, haha! It’ll make putting the cabinets and hardware back on way easier. Also grab a pack of sandpaper (150/medium grit) and cloths for sanding the cabinets.
   • MISC: Grab tarp or paper to cover any surfaces as well as painters’ tape. And then, if you can, grab painters’ pyramids so that you can paint both sides of your cabinets and avoid sticking. We didn’t grab these and had buyer’s remorse – it took longer to finish because of this!
2. PREP
   • Remove Cabinet Doors/Hardware: We took off all the cabinet doors/drawers and put them on a tarp in the front bedroom. Important!! We labeled every door/drawer with the corresponding cabinet so we wouldn’t forget where they went! Since some of you asked – we left all of our dishes in for the most part and pushed them to the back. WE covered them with paper towel to avoid dust/paint getting in. We have pretty big cabinets so this wasn’t an issue for us. We did empty the drawers and just labeled the contents so we knew where they belonged.
   • Wash Cabinets: We used a tsp concentrate + water to wash them all down. Make sure to mix it with water! We did this Friday night and left them to dry overnight.
   • Sand: After the cabinets are dry, using the sand paper, sand down every inch of wood you plan to paint. Like when you paint your nails, you want to create a surface the paint and primer can grip to. You essentially want to remove the shiny surface that was there before!
   • Wipe Clean: Wipe the dust from the sanding away with a microfiber cloth!
   • Tape: finish off the prep by taping all the edges off so you don’t get paint on the trim, ceiling, walls or counter!
3. PAINT!
   • Prime: Do your first layer of primer – we chose this one because it adheres well to shiny surfaces. And, because it’s water based it dried super quickly (oil based takes days to dry). We tried to tackle the cabinets first and then the doors. As the doors were drying we moved back to do the first layer of paint on the cabinets etc.
   • Paint: Paint the cabinets & doors/drawers two times. We ended up doing two coats to get that perfect white we wanted! We used the shade “frost” by Behr in a satin finish. From our research, glossy, semi-gloss and satin are the most common cabinet finishes. We liked the matte look of the satin finish best. We still have some touch ups to do where we taped etc but overall we LOVE the color! It’s a very cool-toned, pure white.
4. FINISH!
   • Hardware: install your new hardware or reinstall your old hardware!
   • Clean up all supplies
   • AND LOVE YOUR NEW FREAKING KITCHEN!

All in all, this process took Kevin and I two weekends – between painting the walls and the cabinets. Two longggg weekends. But we LOVE our kitchen – it feels like we have a new house! And, we instantly added SO much value to our home for $500 total. Crazy! I hope this helps you guys in your home projects! Feel free to ask questions, hopefully I didn’t miss anything!

Liking our supplies we grabbed below!

xx

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