Ways To Update Old Kitchen Cabinets – If you want to redo, repair, or update your kitchen cabinets without major renovations, this list is for you. We’ve rounded up 10 ways you can do just that with some standard tools, live installations, pre-made kits, and more.
Your cave-like kitchen is like that because the dark cabinets absorb all the light from the room. But a brighter change doesn’t mean replacing that boring box with a new one. As long as the frame and doors are structurally sound, you can clean and apply a fresh coat of paint—and take the kitchen from gloomy to warm over the weekend.
Ways To Update Old Kitchen Cabinets
Color changes everything. But a little color can change the style of the wardrobe from plain and simple to sophisticated, rustic, provincial or modern. Here are some of our favorite artificial decorations that can add style to your kitchen.
How Can I Make This Old Kitchen Look Less Atrocious? Its Still Functional And I Want To Avoid Buying New.
This weathered finish comes from a special “crisp glaze” available at paint stores. Apply the glaze to the dry base layer, brushing in one direction only (thick for large cracks and thin for fine cracks). Allow to dry, then finish with an even top coat of the base color, brushing perpendicular to the glaze. The paint will begin to crack as it dries, a process that takes about an hour.
Whether it’s just worn or really beaten up, this rustic finish is made with muted colors and brushed dark paint (to mimic fly stains). When the paint is dry, you can “barely” finish it by chainsawing and lightly sanding the area where the cabinet will use the most paint underneath.
This face causes a slow aging of the surface of the province. Speed up the aging process by dipping the tip of the brush into a color lighter than the cabinet, dab the excess onto the fabric until the brush is almost dry, and lightly burn the surface of a piece, corner, or detailed seam.
Not only does the high-gloss finish repel smudgy fingerprints better than any matte (and is easier to clean), it also lends itself to the look of metal or glass in modern environments. To brighten up a sleek cabinet, apply a top coat of high clear acrylic lacquer to add depth and a glass finish.
Kitchen Hack: Diy Shaker Style Cabinets
The sweet old lady you bought the house from is lovely – really, she is – especially how she gives you homemade cakes for the holidays. However, the kitchen is baked – it’s bad. What’s old can be new again, but grease-covered, kid-scratched cabinets must go.
We’re not saying you have to save and restore it. Instead of spending, say, $5,000 on a new cabinet, save some serious cash and look at one for less than $1,000. Both are available through lumber companies, and some manufacturers offer leather veneers and sticks to make the job easier. Just be sure to measure twice and cut once. Take care and your kitchen will soon look like new.
Make the most of your kitchen storage space by installing pull-out shelves in one or all of the base cabinets. A shallow drawer-like shelf that slides into the back of the cabinet for easy access to stored items.
Our shelves are built for a standard 24″ deep by 33″ wide base cabinet, but the design can be adapted to virtually any cabinet size. It has a 1×4 pine frame and a ¾ inch birch plywood bottom. If you’re only building one or two shelves, you can save money by going to a home center or lumber yard that sells plywood for a quarter or half. And in some cases they will even cut the plywood to your dimensions.
How To Install Hidden Hinges On Old Cabinets
There’s a missing element in most American kitchens, and it’s not a $7,500 range or a 4-acre refrigerator. No, just good lighting. A hidden fixture of the cabinet task lamp, which is quite easy to install under the upper wall cabinet, bathes the panel in bright white light – a benefit for everything from chopping vegetables to reading recipes.
Connect the fixture to a dimmer switch and you also have the key for dramatic accent lighting or a night light for midnight snacks. If you’re a little hesitant to work with electricity, don’t worry. Installation is easy and shock-free if you cut the juice in the breaker box first.
If you’re going home and cozying up to a kitchen, skip the island built into the base cabinet and instead arrange a work space in the middle of the furniture table with a butcher block counter. Because the ends of these thick planks of wood have an edge or end grain, they are stronger than wooden planks. This means that they resist deformation better than laminate and almost as well as stone.
Butcher islands that look like 19th-century workbenches are perfect for relieving the chill of stone counters and metal appliances in a modern kitchen. You can bring this classic aesthetic into your kitchen by building a prep island from readily available materials or choose from dozens of styles available from furniture retailers and manufacturers.
Diy Kitchen Cabinet Makeover Ideas
Plates, dishes, table linens – the sideboard packs a lot of storage into a relatively small footprint, making it a useful addition to any home. Strong, high quality can leave thousands of dollars in losses in finances, but as
General contractor Tom Silva shows how you can add some basic kitchen cabinets with moldings, furniture legs and handles to create a handcrafted piece at a fraction of the cost of buying off-the-shelf.
Choose an unfinished 15- or 18-inch cabinet with working doors and drawers (not the fake drawer fronts used for sink cabinets) and take a day to put all the pieces together. Your beautiful creations will be the focal point of dinner parties for years to come.
For complete step-by-step instructions, a shopping list, and a list of tools, see How to Make a Sideboard from Storage.
Update Your Kitchen
As attractive as window seats are, few older homes have deep bedrooms. And adding a window seat is always considered impractical. First, you need a niche with a window. Next, the seat must be made by the cabinet maker or carpenter to fit the width and height of the window sill. Not surprisingly, this approach is expensive and time-consuming.
This simple, do-it-yourself approach provides “niches” and window seats and plenty of storage space. This bench is built under a 6-foot-wide kitchen window, but the design can easily fit any size window in almost any room. The bench consists of six kitchen wall cabinets and two 48-inch tall bookcases finished with decorative crown molding. The window seat itself consists of two 15-inch refrigerator cabinets mounted side by side.
You can leave the dishes stored in the closed door. Or, if it’s interesting and vibrant, you can create a place to display it, freeing up valuable space and adding color to your kitchen.
No one screams, “I spent a lot of money on a custom closet!” Like crown molding. The trim transforms the kitchen cabinet into a seamless design.
Ideas To Update A Modern Kitchen With Oak Cabinets
It’s easy to add some personality to your wardrobe by adding a wooden frame to the molding that sits above the cabinet. Using a frame allows you to do detail work on a bench – easier than on a ladder – then you can attach the crown from the back so there are no nail holes to fill. After attaching the bezel and crown, you install the entire assembly in one step.
Contractor Tom Silva began his carpentry career more than 35 years ago, often making custom built-in kitchen cabinets for customers. “Back then, it was still expensive to build small shops,” he recalls. “Manufacturers today are building faster and more cost-effectively than they could.”
The goal is to take this collection of boxes and combine them to create a beautiful piece of furniture. The basic sequence of installation is simple: you want to get everything straight, plumb and level. But more often than not, the room does not have these attributes. Do not worry! We can help you get the job done right.
Get the latest old home news, tips, tricks and DIY smart projects from our experts – straight to your inbox. Want to give it a vintage or factory design look without the high price tag? Before you spend a fortune and make a change, try some of these tricks for a special and high-end look on a DIY budget. Most of these can be solved on your own over a long weekend!
These Changes Can Make Old Cabinets Look Modern
We are currently in the middle of the Hacienda Hideaway kitchen and I have spent the last year gathering all the inspiration to take my designs to the next level. I thought it would be fun to share the best ideas I’ve found – pretty much everything I’ll be incorporating into future plans.
Nothing fancy here – a new coat of paint is always the biggest bang for your buck. Most cabinet surfaces can be painted a