Kitchen Makeovers: Before and After
Kitchen makeovers, updates, renovations, remodels …
Kitchen Cabinet Colors
Imagine having a stressful work week, then coming home to a neatly cleaned house. With a great aroma of your favorite food cooking, windows open because of the great weather, birds chirping… but you have BLACK and ugly furnishings, countertops, curtains and designs – yuck!
Where would you begin fixing it? How would you update your kitchen cabinets? After all, they are a mainstay in your kitchen. One has to know how to accentuate every angle, and turn a nasty situation into something that you can enjoy. A theme of a house is the storybook to its eternity. Furnishings, carpets, drapes and extras – everything surrounds how the cabinets look. From the carpet, to the curtains, everything has to match.
Why don’t you start by making your cabinets look great? Stained Kitchen cabinets come in all shapes and sizes. Black, white, cream, pastel and bright colors. How will you represent yourself as a classy individual? Cabinets and colors must be coordinated with kitchen color schemes. There are various mixtures and patterns that one may choose from, but why not start by going to your local hardware store and seeing the kitchen color schemes that they have to offer? By the time you leave, you will see that there are many designs and a wide pattern of colors, but you want something unique. Something fresh and clean and a great representation of yourself and what you are proud of. Go to the hardware store, spend hours there-looking, trying and putting schemes next to one one another to get a feel of what your kitchen could look like. Find the samples, design a template and get your kitchen color ideas, come home, sit down and look at what you have to choose from.
Your kitchen cabinet colors should be something you should be proud of. You should have plenty from the day. They will represent you from the dining room to the kitchen and beyond. It will be a base to your foundation, make it count. Once you have the kitchen color schemes that you are choosing from, pick a good kitchen paint color to start with. Base everything around that. After all, painting and design is going to be a big part of your life.
Cabinets, countertops, floor, curtains, they all will flow evenly and it will be relaxing to feel how it will be like when you are finally exhausted, but done with the project when you are finally able to sit at home, enjoying a nice cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, with the birds chirping and breeze flowing through your house, with nice beautiful kitchen cabinets, followed by a beautiful color scheme and soft curtains accenting the masterpiece you have worked on so diligently. Be proud, you have put thought into what you are doing, and now are the envy of the town.
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Replacement Cabinet Doors
Remodeling your kitchen to make it more modern or to clean up any old or damaged fixtures can add both financial and aesthetic value to your home.
Kitchen cabinets are often one of the first fixtures to require attention, however replacing the entire cabinet unit can be very costly and time consuming. An alternative to complete cabinet replacement is to simply install replacement cabinet doors to your existing cabinets.
Replacement cabinet doors can be custom made to fit your cabinets and your desired look. Cheaper replacement cabinet doors are often made from laminate, which is often a fiberboard material covered in a durable and long lasting plastic coating. You can also buy unfinished cabinet doors that are ready for your primer and paint. Unfinished cabinet doors are often fiberboard or wood that have no existing coats of paint, varnish, or sealer on them so that they accept paint well.
Replacement cabinet doors are available online from wholesalers or from local carpenters. You can even visit large commercial chain hardware stores to order cabinets, although these locations often charge more for the product. Shopping around for the best price can really pay off!
Also wise is the decision to consider a variety of finishes (i.e. paint, stains, glazes, etc.) for the one that will last the longest and look the best in your existing kitchen decor. Finally, additions such as unique hinges can really bring an interesting look to your cabinets. Search online or in the hardware store for these, or be adventurous and look at junk yards or resale shops for antique pieces.
No matter what you decide, though, remodeling your cabinets is certainly a wise-investment in your home for both equity and look.
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New Kitchen Cabinet Handles – Quick Makeover Potential!
Many people are frustrated with their out of date kitchen cabinets. The prospect of purchasing new kitchen cabinets can be an expensive and an intimidating thought. However, it is possible to completely update a kitchen’s look by changing the kitchen cabinet handles and knobs. New kitchen cabinet handles can really change the entire look. Adding discount cabinet hardware can be the difference between a bland cabinet and one that looks as if it costs a lot more.
There are endless options available. You can go with one of several popular brushed metal looks, and go from knobs to pulls. There are many different styles of kitchen cabinet pulls that can be placed either on the cabinet door or drawer.
You can do something different by adding a natural wood handle. Not many people have a wood pull, but they are available. You can get a pull that is colored natural oak color pull that blends in with the cabinet door or drawer. This is very original and can be a really unique look. The cabinet door almost looks like one solid piece of wood.
If you’re trying to change the look of a kitchen that’s used a lot by kids, you can add more color by using acrylic kitchen cabinet handles and pulls that accent the cabinet doors and drawers very well. There is even hardware that is themed with cartoon characters. You don’t need to worry if your children are hard on this hardware, as it’s durable and perfect for a kid-focused kitchen.
Another option is a bail pull. This type of pull looks similar to a front door knocker and can be very attractive for kitchen cabinet pulls. This look can be great in a darker finish of metal, like oil rubbed bronze, and also works well with a darker wood finish.
If you’re looking on more of an antique style there are many other finishes and styles of pulls and knobs that you can get. You can refinish the cabinet surface to a darker color wood grain, and add a more dramatic effect with the antique hardware.
If you want to go with a more contemporary feeling you can choose a lighter finish of wood with a handle that has a more squared-off edge that looks cleaner. It’s also a very modern look to have a full length pull, often in stainless steel which can match your stainless steel appliance pulls.
You can also change out other kitchen cabinet hardware apart from handles, such as the hinges. There are endless options with hinges as well, and you can change the look significantly by adding new ones. If you currently have a standard offset hinge on your cabinet door, consider hinges that are hidden inside the cabinet and don’t show when the door is closed, giving the cabinet a cleaner more modern look. Or, you could keep the visible hinges but update them by changing them to match the material of your new cabinet pulls so all your kitchen cabinet hardware coordinates.
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Kitchen Before and After pics from petit hiboux
I rather like the buttery yellow cabinet color myself, but petit hiboux is right that color just doesn’t go with the newer bright colors in the other rooms.
In the after shot – the cabinets have been painted white, the copper-colored hinges have been stripped back to the underlying pewter color, and the walls are bright blue. All good, but now the harvest gold fridge sticks out like a sore thumb and it’s hard to know what you could do with the spotty tile. Tile over it would probably be the best bet, if it’s solidly attached to the wall.
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Kitchen Cabinet Makeover examples
I’ve been wandering through the many kitchen makeover videos online, looking at what other people have done to their existing kitchen cabinets, since I don’t plan on ripping my perfectly serviceable (if ugly) cabinets out.
The kitchen cabinets in this video are very similar to mine – face frames with flat slab doors. These people painted the frames black, then glued pale birch veneer onto the door fronts and varnished. Looks great, though I would probably go with a light color for the frames instead of black. They also did a lot of other work but left some old countertops in place. Given that counters are one of the simplest things to change, that seems a bit odd, but maybe they have Stage II in mind!
Next, a low budget makeover on a kitchen that was really pretty good to start with. They changed the wall color from dark green to a light color, changed the faucet and the light fixtures, and the cabinet pulls, and bingo – what a difference!
Finally… well, to me, this is a “what not to do” makeover. Bright red floor, bright red door centers on white cabinets, bright red tabletop, and far, far too much fruity wallpaper. The final straw is the ugliest chandelier in the world over the sink. I wonder how long the homeowners kept it like this?
I’ll just have to remember to take video of mine when the time comes, eh. Still working on the bathroom right now though, sanding drywall mud <cough>.
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My kitchen: the Before pictures
Here are the pictures of my kitchen in its “before” state.
First, here’s how it looked when I viewed the house before buying. There’s a black dishwasher in place, the range is sitting properly between base cabinets, it’s ugly (and dirty, though you can’t see that) but there’s a 6ft clear counter run and plenty of storage. The fridge is only a few years old.
Here’s how it looked as I was moving in. The dishwasher has vanished and the hole is boarded up.
The range has been pulled out into the middle of the floor and it won’t go back between the cabinets. Between my 6′ 3″ friend and I, we tried real hard, but it wouldn’t go. There was a piece missing off the end of the (almost new) countertop beside it, too. I later found out that an electrician who had been called in to fix the supply wiring to the range while the house was up for sale, had had to cut the counter top in order to get the range out, it was glued in so thoroughly by grease and food-goo. The reason we couldn’t get it to go back in was that the second oven, the one at the top, wouldn’t fit between the upper cabinets (which had been cut years before to get it in, but not with enough clearance. Or maybe they were built around it originally and were cut to get it out. Whatever. There was no bottom shelf to the cabinet over the range.)
You can see from this that the kitchen is quite long – 16 feet. It’s a pity that the range and sink are, to my mind, the wrong way round: I want to move from prep at the sink, to cooking at the range, to serving into the dining room, all in the same direction. Not finish cooking at the far end near the back door!
Here’s the old range in all its glory. It had originally been harvest gold, but then painted white with flat latex paint, and the white was peeling off. It actually functioned quite well (I liked the eye-level oven), and it even came with all the parts to a rotisserie attachment, but it had to go. Off to a friend’s cabin it went.
I replaced it with a lightly used Kenmore self-cleaning convection range. I don’t mind the curly-wurly burners, they work just fine (and I hate the way things get baked on those smooth ceramic range tops) and I love the convection oven. AND it fits all the way back against the wall between the cabinets!
Next up: the weird lacy cabinet handles and the carpeted toekick!
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