Kitchen - Bangor Foursquare
- Created: Oct 30, 2009 by maestra74
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Rated:
We wanted to bring our kitchen into the 21st century - when we bought the house in 2008 it was stuck somewhere in the 1970s. Our biggest challenge was keeping it under budget. We're both educators and didn't have a lot of spare cash. We had also never done any real home improvement projects before so we had a steep learning curve. We learned a lot from websites like houseblogs.net, thisoldhouse.com, and from how-to books.
When we bought the house, the kitchen came with an asbestos-laden vinyl flower, a dropped ceiling complete with fluorescent light boxes, and beautiful woodwork that had been painted dark brown to look like wood (yes, really). Over the course of the summer months we were able to pull down the old ceiling, lights, and soffits, paint the kitchen cabinets and woodwork, install a cork floor, install new lighting and drywall the ceiling, install a new butcher block countertop, and a tile backsplash. To save money we kept appliances and plumbing where they were but updated them (two of the three were broken when we moved in). All of our renovations were environmentally-friendly - making choices about low VOC paints, a cork floor, and energy-saving appliances were important to us.
Our final budget breakdown:
Drywall for ceiling $60
Wiring from Home Depot $30
Lighting from Lowe's $220
New faucet from Home Depot $80
Countertops from Ikea $237
Paint (for cabinets, walls) from Sherwin-Williams $60
Drawer pulls from Lowe's $60
Cork floor from Home Depot $727
Thresholds from Gray and Sons $40
Tile from Lowe's and cooltiles.com $100
Total: $1614
Appliances (purchased separately from Sears):
Vent hood $200
Dishwasher $600
Refrigerator $800
Range $1200
Total with appliances: $4334
Our lessons learned:
1) Never say "it will only take..." or "it should be easy to..." You never know what surprises lurk underneath or behind old work. Assume the worst and then you can be pleasantly surprised if it takes less time than you planned.
2) Friends are wonderful. Drywall is heavy. Enough said.
3) Don't be afraid to try. We were really intimidated at first to take on many of the projects that awaited us in the kitchen - whether it was plumbing, wiring, or drywalling. What we found out it is that it was often much easier than it appeared when we did our homework first.
Project Gallery
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- Categories: Green Renovations, Cabinet Refacing, Kitchens
- Tag: Remodel
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Comments
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Love how your new kitchen turned out. I was wondering how your counter tops have held up as I am thinking about purchasing the same ones.
Victoria, Nov 13, 2009
