F is Also for Facelift...

Friday, July 30, 2010

Good afternoon!

Well, I think I have officially been reading one too many ABC books with Cookie Crumb. I keep thinking of titles for blog posts that are in the same format as above. Oh dear! Anyways I finally got around to giving my new kitchen a little facelift. While apartment cupboards are often cheap and outdated, that doesn't mean we can't help things out a little bit. This project cost me under $30, so it's a reasonable price to pay for a little kitchen facelift. I'd love to be able to do something about the floors, but I'm not sure that will happen.

Before I get too far in, let me just apologize for the photos. The kitchen gets zero natural light, so it's hard to take nice photos with my fairly basic digital camera!

So, here's what I did. I bought some woodgrain contact paper to line the cupboards and drawers to start off with. I didn't get a before picture of the worst of it, which was the cupboard under the sink. It had the nasty green and white contact paper, but the pipes had obviously leaked and it was dirty and gross and the paper was torn and disgusting. I think I was just so eager to clean and cover it that I didn't bother.

Before
After
That was step one. Step two was replacing the handles on the cupboards and drawers. I opted for the cheapest ones that fit on the old holes. These ones are plain black plastic and they were 79¢ each!
Before
Amazingly outdated, hey? :)
It was quite obvious that nobody had done this before because most of the handles stayed in place with the screws out. They were stuck on my mystery gunk and a few took some muscle to pull off. Yuck. So I obviously scrubbed all the gunk off before putting the new handles on. It was a super easy job and I think it makes a huge difference.
Mystery Gunk... Gross!
After!
Finally, I tossed all the old hardware in a big freezer bag so I can put them back on when we leave!

Ta-da! I'm pretty happy with the results. It makes a nice difference in the kitchen. The cupboards just look cheap and a little outdated rather than completely hideous. :)

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