Minimalist Kitchen Makeover

When we purchased our house 2 years ago, the kitchen was the biggest draw-back for us. My husband was disappointed about the electric stove, and neither of us were big fans of the closed-off layout.

Both of these drawbacks were of course fixable…. at a cost. Ultimately we knew that this wasn’t going to be our forever home and that we wanted to eventually make a respectable return on our investment.

So instead of doing a full kitchen renovation, we chose to do more of a kitchen makeover.

Kitchen Makeover Before and After

First thing we did was replace the baseboards and update the flooring to the same laminate we used in the rest of the house. Because the entire first floor was tile, they were able to lay the laminate directly on top which saved us a good amount of money in labor costs.

Next was paint. We had both the walls and cabinets (both inside and out) repainted. Walls were Droplets by DE and the trim was White by DE.

We also had our contractor’s team remove the fluorescent ceiling light and replace it with LED can lights and crown moulding instead.

We replaced the electric range, dishwasher, and garbage disposal but kept the existing fridge and microwave (it wasn’t a standard size microwave so would require updating cabinets/backsplash to replace it – money we weren’t ready to spend!).

Lastly, we added 2 shelving units to store dry pantry goods and small appliances like our toaster oven, InstantPot, and Kitchenaid Mixer.

Minimalist Kitchen Products & Accessories

We do our best to only keep items in our kitchen that we use frequently and love. Plus, keeping dry pantry goods on display helps to regularly remind us of what ingredients we have available to work with.

1. Hanging Fruit Baskets
2. Salt Cellar
3. Ikea Shelves + 2 Drawers
4. Le Parfait Jars – We use these to store basic, unpackaged, bulk dry goods like rice, granola, trail mix, coffee, oats, chocolate chips, flour, sugar, etc. (we also use these in our fridge to store meat and cheese purchased sans packaging)
5. Wooden Mixing Bowl – We serve sides like salads in this
6. Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls
7. Classic Wine Glasses
8. High Ball Glasses
9. Lowball Glasses
10. Vitamix Blender – We use ours at least 3 times a week for cooking and breakfast smoothies
11. Instant Pot – We use this also 3+ times a week, if we were to re-buy we would get this model because of the (zero waste) yogurt making feature!
12. Toaster Oven – I recently learned that you can bake single cookies in a toaster oven… is there a better way to end the day than with a freshly baked chocolate-chip cookie?
13. Kitchenaid Mixer
14. Storage Baskets – This is where I toss dirty cleaning rags, microfiber cloths, and bulk bin shopping bags

How Much Did This Kitchen Makeover Cost?

It’s difficult to confine the cost of labor and materials to only our kitchen because many projects like paint and flooring were charged as a lump sum for the whole house.

With that said, estimating that our kitchen is about 200sqft (about 1/7 of our 1450sqft home) I did my best to break out the pricing for just the kitchen projects:

• Floors (Garrison Collection Maui Laminate) & baseboards – $675
• Paint – $475
  • Wall Paint Color: Droplets (DEW381) by Dunn Edwards
  • Trim Paint Color: White (DEW380) by Dunn Edwards
• Fluorescent Light Removal and Update – $300
• Cabineet Hardware – Celeste Bar Pull Cabinet Handle Oil-Rubbed Bronze Solid Steel, 3″x4″ – $30

Total Makeover Cost: $1480 (not inclusive of appliance replacements)

Kitchen Cleaning and Maintenance

Now that we have an updated kitchen, we try our best to keep everything clean! Check out these posts for important how-to’s:

• How to clean a porcelain sink
• How to deep clean your fridge
• How to clean your oven, oven knobs, & electric stove coils
• Granite countertop cleaning recipe
• Window cleaning recipe