Upgrade Your Kitchen on a Budget

The kitchen is a place of congregation and community for many families. Without a comfortable kitchen space, not only are meals harder to make, the entire feeling of your home can feel off. Upgrading your kitchen space doesn’t have to cost a fortune and these inexpensive upgrades will add new life to the most used room in your house – check out these tips for how to upgrade your kitchen on a budget!

Open-Box Cabinets from Retailers

Retail outlets like Lowes and Home-Depot sell cabinet packages from major brands (here’s a look at how to choose the right kind of wood), but if a cabinet set doesn’t fit into a new home or a contractor wants to try something else, they often return entire sets to the store. Once a cabinet has been opened, it gets moved to a storage shelf at the back of the store and open-box pricing is applied. Customers who aren’t necessarily picky about the types of cabinets they get can see deep discounts from open-box deals.

New Paint

Sometimes an existing kitchen cabinet set only needs a new coat of paint to bring new life to it. Latex paint can be purchased for less than $50/bucket and can cover an entire kitchen-cabinet suite. Latex paint helps protect cabinets from water and heat damage from escaping stove or oven steam.

New Linoleum Flooring

Linoleum, while frowned upon once upon a time for its cheapness, now comes in many exciting colors and designs. A new linoleum floor can be much easier to clean and along with a new coat of paint could revitalize the color scheme of an entire kitchen.

Large Butcher Block

When people upgrade their kitchen, one of the first additions is more counter space. When counter-space is sparse, adding a butcher block counter-top to a kitchen island can quickly add much more usable space to a cluttered kitchen.

Pots and Pans Rack

Cabinet space can quickly be lost to bulky pots and pans. By using a hanging pot rack, you can save precious cabinet space to declutter your counter-tops by moving your pots and pans to hang overhead. Pot racks are generally inexpensive and easy to self-install.

Ambient Lighting

You don’t have to be an electrician to install new lighting in the kitchen. Sconces and ambient track lighting can be installed using wire-concealers to hide the wires from view and easy-to-follow online tutorials can help you wire the lighting to a switch on an existing circuit.

Shelving

A lack of space is easily solved with additional shelving. Shelves are one of the easiest kitchen upgrades you can make and shelving made from recycled materials is very inexpensive. Shelves provide the same function as cabinet space, but can be used to show off decorative dishes and cookware instead of hiding it in the cabinet.

Home Warranty

If your home is still under warranty and things in the kitchen start to break, you may be eligible to make a claim against the warranty for an upgrade. Since home accessories are continually upgraded by manufacturers, if they break before the home warranty terms are over, the contractor who built your home may be able to get newer cabinets or kitchen appliances than the ones originally installed.

Building Materials on Craigslist

An unlikely place to find discounted building materials is on Craigslist. After contractors are finished with a job, they often post their unused building materials to the free classifieds site. You can get deep discounts on everything from extra flooring to unused paint. These small purchases could help add extra flair to your kitchen without breaking the bank.

Chalkboard Wall

Kitchens often get cluttered with recipe books, grocery lists, and scattered notes. Use an unoccupied wall or cabinet to paint the side with chalkboard paint to let you make notes and save yourself the hassle of unnecessary papers strewn throughout the space. This small tip for un-cluttering your kitchen can help it feel like a revitalized space.