By Tresa Erickson
Take a walk through your home. How’s your kitchen holding up? Is it starting to look a bit outdated and worn? Perhaps it’s time you changed that. Don’t have a lot of money to spend? No problem. You don’t have to spend big bucks on a kitchen remodel to make the room look good. With a few inexpensive fixes, you give your kitchen a whole new look.
Paint is one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways to transform the appearance of a room. Almost any surface in the kitchen can be painted from wooden cabinets to laminate countertops to paneled walls to faded linoleum. Go ahead, be brave and paint your kitchen walls that bold color you’ve always wanted. Brighten your dark cabinets and woodwork with a fresh coat of white paint. Transform those old laminate countertops and linoleum floors with a faux finish resembling stone.
Want to make your freshly painted cabinets sing? Give them new pulls. Switching out old hardware for new will do wonders to revive tired cabinets and update a kitchen. Even if you decided to stick with your cabinets as is, don’t neglect replacing the hardware. You will be surprised what an effect such a small change will have.
How’s the lighting in your kitchen? Not so great? Replace it. Take down that brass chandelier from the 1970s and paint or replace it. Switch out that tarnished brass overhead light for a sleek chrome one and that mustard-colored globe in the light above the sink for a frosted white one. Lighting fine, but need more of it? You don’t have to hire an electrician to install more lighting in your kitchen. You can find a variety of battery-operated fixtures that you can install yourself. If those won’t work, consider adding a lamp somewhere in the room.
Traffic flow in your kitchen a little tight? Take a good, hard look at what’s in your kitchen and eliminate all of the pieces of furniture that you can do without. Get rid of that baker’s rack and store your cookbooks in a cabinet or drawer. Trade out your large kitchen table for a smaller one and move the plants to the bay window in the living room. Clear the way for better traffic flow in your kitchen.
Clutter taken hold of your kitchen? Put a stop to it. Take a day to sort through drawers and cabinets and clear away all of the clutter. Donate items you never or rarely use. Bring in trays, lazy Susans and other items to organize the stuff remaining. Move small appliances off the countertops and into a cabinet. Get rid of the clutter and see how spacious your kitchen becomes.
Once you have given your kitchen a facelift, don’t forget to clean it. Nothing brightens up a room like a thorough cleaning. Wash those cabinets inside and out, scrub that backsplash and floor, and scour those appliances. Make your new kitchen sparkle.
