Apartment Kitchen Rebuild

While it would certainly be ideal to have tens of thousands of dollars available to invest into a kitchen renovation, that simply wasn’t the case for my husband and I.

With over $40,000 worth of more pressing, surprise projects surfacing during the first two years of our fixer upper journey (not to mention a baby on the way), it quickly became apparent that my “dream kitchen” was not going to be feasible. If I wanted to make any cosmetic updates to our 1980’s home at all, I was going to have to get scrappy .

In today’s post, I am sharing some clever hacks (and products) that we utilized for staying within a restrictive budget while transforming our outdated kitchen.

And while we did originally hire a professional to paint the kitchen cabinets (this was about a $1200 investment), after discovering a product known as Milk Paint (you can read the full tutorial on using Milk Paint here), I am confident I could have painted all of the cabinets myself. In fact, I have painted several cabinets with Milk Paint since discovering the product (and you can read my review for it here), and the finish is super forgiving. Not only is the product very forgiving, it has proven to be just as durable as the oil-based paint applied by the professional.

Bottom line: Never underestimate the transformative powers of paint, my friends!