How to: Update A Kitchen on A Budget
You’re an investor, and need to upgrade your kitchen on budget. You know every penny you save is money back into your pocket. Kitchens, bathrooms, and the details will sell your house! Let’s look at some reasonable ways to improve your existing kitchen, but keeping what you can and only replacing what you must.
Repaint the cabinets if the boxes are in good condition. This is a low-cost and high-impact project. You can completely change the whole look and state of the kitchen. Stick with a neutral color like white, light blue or navy, warm gray (like Sherwin Williams Worldly Gray), sage green, neutral beige (don’t want it to run orange or yellow), or black and white combo (black on the bottom and white on top). I consider blues and greens neutral, because they never go out of style and are generally loved.
New hardware will improve the function, and greatly elevate the style. Go with a combination of pulls and knobs for a custom look. Something like this (pulls, knobs) or this (pulls, knobs).
Example kitchen shown below- I got a huge bundle of cabinet hardware off of Facebook marketplace. This house had a TON of cabinets in the basement with hideous hardware. It would have cost a fortune to replace them all, so I got the whole house covered for $10). I probably would have chosen gold if it was in the budget to buy new, so I got what I could afford, and it still sold for an area record high (per square foot).
New tile backsplash: You can save on labor and go with a peel and stick, but I’d recommend the real thing. Peel and stick is not very cheap, so if you put in a classic white subway tile backsplash- you won’t be spending much more, and it’s much better quality. If you do the labor yourself- you’ll spend less money or you could go with a nicer product. Time is money too, so a good middle ground is usually going with a more inexpensive product. The kitchen shown below, I used a subway tile that had some color variation and was a little warmer in color: bleach white subway tile clashed with the new countertops.
Open shelving: Find a blank wall where you won’t disrupt traffic, and add some open shelving; or, remove an upper cabinet or two. Removing a cabinet- this one is debatable, and definitely case-by-case. If you’re already lacking cabinet space, I don’t know that I would do that unless it really open up the room and makes it feel bigger.
Example from a house I did in 2020: This cabinet was hard to reach (so not very functional), kitchen also had a pantry and a few more cabinets that aren’t shown in photo. and so storage wasn’t a huge issue. Removing it really opened up the line of sight- making the room feel bigger. As soon as I took it down I knew it was the right call. Open shelving could have been added, but was not.
5. Lighting upgrades are my favorite. It is the quickest and most affordable way to make a huge impact! Take out those small, and ugly builder grade pendants and boob lights, and add some beautiful pendant lights or a chandelier. I was trying to convince a client of that once, and so I brought her to my house. She walked into my house and the first thing she said was, “"I love that light fixture! Oh, I see your point.” She quickly saw it was worth the money and effort, because, the first thing she noticed when she walked into my house was the lighting. Check out this site for beautiful and affordable lighting.
I’ve used this fixture in multiple rooms in multiple houses to add lighting where it was lacking. It also gives the room a modern flare.
6. Countertops: Keep them if you can! Design around them if you can (I recommend this with floors too). If you pick all of your other finishes around your less favorable finish- you may find you don’t mind it so much. Even if that means spending a little more on your backsplash to save yourself from replacing countertops (you’ll save thousands-it’s probably worth it).
For stone countertops- go onto Facebook Marketplace and look for stone yards that have remnants (type “countertop remnants” in the search bar). You can get stone for roughly half the price than going in and buying a whole slab.
Butcher block is an inexpensive option, but it does come with maintenance. So let your buyer know, or if you’re a landlord- make sure you’re keeping up on it.
Faux stone countertops- inexpensive, but make sure your neighborhood market doesn’t expect real stone. If it’s a lower income neighborhood- faux stone can be a great option.
There are kits online that allow you to paint your countertops, or add a faux finish contact paper top. Again, know your market. Nicer homes and neighborhoods will expect stone, and this wouldn’t be a good option.
7. Replace the faucet: hardware, lighting, and the faucet are like jewelry- they really finish off the look. See the pictures above, and try to envision this space without nice fixtures. It would look completely different. Now, this house is obviously nothing fancy. It’s in a lower income neighborhood, and we spent all of our money just making it livable.Almost everything inside needed redoing—floors were coming up—so we used creative sources for mid century finishes (which can be very expensive) to make the place appealing to buyers.
