Increase your home’s value by giving your kitchen a makeover!
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Revamping a kitchen can be financially demanding; The Spruce warns that kitchens “are one of the most expensive areas of the home to remodel due to the material and labour costs.” Though you might be tempted to go entirely down the DIY route and not bring in any outside contractors, you might lack the specialist expertise to complete all of the tasks yourself to the required standard. You can, however, still save money — by being selective with what changes are made in the first place. You could, for example…
Refresh, Rather than Replace, the Cabinets
Do those cabinets really need replacing in their entirety? If you were only considering swapping them out for aesthetic reasons, the answer could well be no.
Generally, the more of your kitchen’s existing materials you keep, the cheaper the overall remodelling project can be. If you want to visually update your kitchen cabinets, you could simply paint them in a new colour or give them new hardware, like knobs and handles.
Put up some Open Shelving
You might not necessarily want to keep all of your kitchen’s existing cabinets. That’s because there’s much positive to be said for replacing cabinets with open shelving.
Good Homes enthuses: “Removing kitchen cupboards is a far easier job than installing them, and then it’s just a case of filling and smoothing any holes in the wall before repainting walls and installing shelving.”
Then, of course, you can get on with styling up with new shelving. That’s what Good Homes calls “the fun part”.
Preserve your Kitchen’s Existing Layout
The layout of your kitchen is like the ‘skeleton’ of its design. In other words, it’s what everything else — the ‘flesh’ of your kitchen’s design, you could perhaps say — is built around.
Keeping the current layout and simply replacing or tinkering with fittings — like the sink, refrigerator, cabinets, shelving and flooring — that are already in place can significantly clash the cost of the project as a whole.
That’s because shaking up the layout instead could require you to have new plumbing and electrical work undertaken within the space.
Install Extra Lighting
You could be pleasantly surprised by how different your kitchen looks and feels as a result of new lights being fitted in it.
Ideal Home explains: “Ideally, you should have task lights, such as spotlights, over the worktops; halogen bulbs on the extractor; and overhead lighting with ambient light in a dining area.”
Some light fixtures can produce an astonishing amount of illumination. For example, pendant ceiling bars each comprise multiple bulbs.
Add a Rug
Yes, a kitchen isn’t exactly the most conventional place for a rug. Still, simply adding one can leave the room looking revitalized — the kind of effect you might have already seen from putting a rug down in, say, your living room.
The best part of the kitchen to place a rug would arguably be just in front of the sink — since, for obvious reasons, members of the household are likely to stand in this particular spot at least fairly often.
