5 Easy Kitchen Updates August 23, 2020 – Posted in: Home Improvement – Tags: kitchen, kitchen furniture
When we moved in one of the subcontractors said they’d been wondering why we didn’t tear out the old cabinets and mismatched appliances and pink laminate counters and redo the kitchen before we moved in. But if you’ve followed us for a while, you know the answer. We like to live with a kitchen for a nice long time before changing the layout or doing any major upgrades like replacing the cabinets or counters (in our last house we waited three years for our big renovation). Actually living somewhere for a while to figure out what we like & find functional/useful versus trying to guess how we *think* we’re going to use a space in the early days of a new home just feels a lot less like a shot in the dark.
The wait is also beneficial because we can save our money for the larger renovation down the line, and implement some quick & affordable updates to tide us over. Not only do these smaller changes make the space work and look better in the meantime, they also let us test-run things that we’re mulling over for our big reno in a nice low pressure way. One simple example is: “will we really like open shelves there? Or would we rather have upper cabinets when we do the full reno down the line? Let’s just hang some shelves for now and live with them and see what we think!”
1. New Hanging Pendant Light
There used to be a lone off-centered boob light on the kitchen ceiling.
We added a bunch of recessed lights when we learned that all the drywall had to be replaced so the ceilings would be open anyway (more on that here), and decided to have them move that original fixture box to the center of the room instead of terminating it – just because we figured it might be useful for some sort of accent light at some point. If not, we could always pop another can in there and call it a day. The point is that we had a capped fixture box in the center of the room, and a few weeks ago we decided to use it to swag a pendant light over our eat-in table. Hello instant gratification.
2. Painting The Dishwasher
We didn’t replace any of the kitchen appliances before moving in (we’d rather spend that money when we know exactly what’ll work best in the eventual renovation – what if we got stainless but later wanted white?! Or got a slide in stove but later wanted a wall oven). We’re very thankful that although these appliances are old, they all work just fine and are in decent condition. The black dishwasher was momentarily puzzling, just because the stove & fridge are both white – but it wasn’t anything that we couldn’t change in under an hour.
Since our cabinet color is specific enough for us to be sure they don’t sell it in a spray paint – we’re thinking we’ll just try rolling/brushing it on the dishwasher when we paint the cabinets and see how it works out. If it’s a disaster we figure we can add a thin panel to the front of the dishwasher that we can paint to match (maybe with beadboard or luan?). That’s another pro to Phase 1 projects, you can take some risks and experiment a bit because they’re not permanent solutions anyways!).
3. Swapping Out The Cabinet Knobs
Our previous knobs were those traditional wood knobs that were painted to match the doors, and they felt sort of big and kind of gave us a “country” vibe.
4. Hung Floating Shelves
In order to remove the soffit across the back wall of the original kitchen, we also had to lose the upper cabinets. We knew we’d be losing some helpful storage in the process, but we downsized a ton before moving here and actually have found our seven cabinet kitchen to be even more functional than we hoped (you can see how we’re storing things in this post).
5. Framed Our Teil Duncan Painting
The last thing isn’t really a “kitchen renovation” as much as its just a change in the room that you may have noticed amidst the others when you studied those two “spot the difference” photos. We bought this Teil Duncan painting six years ago as an anniversary gift to ourselves and for most of those six years have intended to frame it or have it framed. And yet… it remained unframed for all that time.