Get All You Want Plus the Kitchen Sink

How we upgraded our kitchen on a budget

After taking a bit of a break from home improvement projects, my husband and I were ready to tackle another upgrade. The kitchen is the heart of a home. You spend quite a bit of time there, preparing and cleaning up after meals – especially if like me, you work from home. My husband and I both cook and I like to bake a good bit so we’ve both been craving this update for a while.

We lucked out with our kitchen, well the house in general. It has “good bones”. We haven’t had to do anything drastic or major as the house is really sound. The lay out of the kitchen works for us and it’s a good size so we avoided the really heavy lifting. We even lucked out with great cabinets…they just needed a little TLC.

Kitchen Appliance Upagrade

A few months after we moved in, our first big update to the home was to purchase new kitchen appliances. This helped our overall kitchen upgrade because we were able to space out the cost.

The biggest cost was the appliances, we grabbed them on sale in January and were able to take advantage of a financing deal through Lowes which saved us a couple hundred dollars. If you can space some of the bigger costs out, I’d recommend it. You can pay as you go for the project and avoid taking out loans or racking up big credit card debt.

Counter Top Upgrade

My husband loves to research. God bless him. I can get a bit overwhelmed with all of the stats and figures. He looked at all of the counter top options available from Ikea and Lowes, to every granite and corian product on the market. Through it all, we learned a few things:

• Counter tops can be darn expensive.
• We like butcher block.
• It’s really durable (which makes it hard to cut in some cases).

While the first was, the second wasn’t really a shock for me. My parents refinished antiques when I was growing up as a hobby. We have this gorgeous butcher block island and I had always liked it. Now it’s my chance to get that look in our kitchen. Chris fell in love with it too. So we had our decision made.

It was time to measure 15 times and pile into the Tacoma for a family Lowe’s trip. (Seriously the dog has a tantrum if we don’t take him)

Lowe’s Butcher block comes in two different lengths and a precut island option. A bit of a tip – when selecting your pieces from the store, try to find ones where the packaging isn’t ripped. Butcher block dries out when not coated with mineral oil or a food safe stain and right from the store they’re not yet coated.

We sealed the bottom and sides of the counter pieces before we started cutting and then sealed the tops when they were in place. We chose a natural mineral oil that Lowe’s sells with their counter tops rather than a food safe stain as we like the honey color it gives the wood. It matches our existing floors.

New Sink!

Sorry I laugh every time I read this. We told my 2 year old niece we were getting a new sink and she walked around for an hour singing “new sink” over and over. We looked high and low at different sinks. Having the butcher block counters and not wanting to finish or worry about cut edges we couldn’t do an “in counter” or a sink mounted below the counter. I wanted to but it would have been way too much work (and we didn’t want to buy another counter top piece or two…)

We decided on a porcelain farmhouse sink from Ikea. This is our second sink from Ikea. I was a bit nervous when we bought the first one in the apartment. If you’re not terribly hard on them, they hold up well. I would recommend getting something to protect the bottom of your sink from pots and pans.

To pair with our sink, we found a Moen faucet from Lowe’s. Since the sink we purchased doesn’t have holes for the faucet, we had to mount this into the counter. I love the look but man, the holes were tough to drill. My husband broke out his grandfather’s old drill that may or may not be from the 20’s.

Lastly, the Walls got some TLC

Waiting and watching for the right tile really gave me the opportunity to pull the rest of the living space up stairs together and find the color we wanted to be the focal point. We chose a deep/rich blue color and have featured that in our curtains. In the kitchen, we had wainscoting on all of the walls. We’ve kept it on two. And we’ve painted it a matching shade of blue.

I get all of our paint from our local Benjamin Moore specialist, Colorize of Pittsburgh. The people here are incredibly helpful and really care about your projects. They also save your information for different projects so you can stop back in an ask what pain you used three years ago. They even custom mixed us a color for the bedroom not too long ago free of charge.

Having the color in mind, we spotted a hand painted looking subway tile. We liked it but we weren’t ready to commit yet. Ironically when we were ready, the tile was marked on clearance! Hurray for us! My husband did an incredible job replacing the old wainscoting with the new tile and it fits with the kitchen so well!