Kitchen mini renovation

This dear little house that we're living in is getting very small for us and for a while now we've been dreaming about selling it. Before selling it though, we've felt like some renovations needed to be done. As we want to sell it our budget was as small as possible, so we tried to find cheper options with still keeping the quality good. We were so lucky to have my brother and my sister-in-law over as they have a lot of experience in renovating and they did most of the work for us. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Here's what we started with. Beautiful bright yellow bench top, I did grow to like it so I was a little sad to see it dissappear. Creamy colour cabinets with plastic handles and grey walls. I wanted to get new doors for the cupboard but as we started to search for new ones we realised that these ones were once custom made to fit here. It meant that there were no doors in any shops that would have been the same size to ours. With grinding teeth I had to let go of that vision and get use to the idea that these creamy doors would stay.

We then went to a salvage yard to see if we could find anything that would help us with the renovations. A salvage yard is a place that sells anything left over from someone's renovations and selling it very cheap. We found almost straight away the long white tiles for the wall and the grey floor tiles for the bench. We saved over 70% in cost by getting these tiles from salvage yard compared to getting them from a tile shop.

Because the yellow bench top was in such good condition we, and with we I mean my brother and my husband, started to lay the grey tiles down on top of it. And as the grey tiles were originally floor tiles, they are very strong and thick. I was very happy with that. Who would have thought to put tiles on the bench? Not me for sure, but my brother had done it twise and had been very happy with the result so I thought why not try it. Now I love it!

For a whole week, my kitchen was in our laundry as the real kitchen was construction site. It was so exciting to see and learn how to renovate this kitchen.

Here's the end result. In the end we changed the handles and the difference in huge compared to what we started with. The grey bench makes the creaminess of the cupboards so mild that I can totally stand it now. So with very little money spent our kitchen got a nice makeover.

Next, the bathroom makeover...