How to save on an entire kitchen remodel

When my husband and I toured our future home for the first time with our real estate agent, we didn’t linger too long inside the house. We were so excited about the property itself and all of the outbuildings, and other features on the property that we hardly paid attention to the interior of the home. We walked through briefly and knew right off the bat that we would give it a good scrub, paint the entire interior and replace all the floors.

Fast forward to closing day, our plans shifted. The seller had been living in the house up until closing day, so now that we had eyes on a mostly empty house, we realized it needed a lot more work than we intended. Our original plan was to just give the kitchen a deep clean and paint the walls, but at second glance, we knew the kitchen had to be scratched and completely re-done. The cabinets were falling apart, the dishwasher was leaking and didn’t work, the fridge and oven were caked with grease and food splatters…it was a wreck.

The only problem was, we didn’t budget a new kitchen so we knew we had to get savvy. Our ENTIRE kitchen including cabinets, hardware, countertops, appliances, a new sink, fixtures, new pantry shelving, open shelving, and paint cost us under 10k. “How”, you ask?

1Do it yourself. Instead of hiring someone, we were able to save a fortune by doing the work ourselves. From ripping out floors and cabinets, disconnecting and removing appliances, scrubbing and painting the walls, installing hardware, you name it! Thankfully my dad and gramps have contracting backgrounds and they were kind enough to help install cabinets and appliances, and my mamma helped with painting. We also have some pretty incredible friends who lent their time and expertise helping us out.There are also so many useful resources out there that helped us complete our projects. We were on YouTube constantly looking up how to do certain things and I spent a lot of time scrolling Pinterest gathering ideas and inspirations.

The first couple of weeks after moving to the farm, I was up until at least midnight every night working on house projects.  My hands were perpetually covered in paint and grime and I constantly felt like I had been hit by a bus. But it was worth it and it was fun! I learned so many things and it felt good to see results from all of my hard work.

2Shop in-stock products. There are hundreds if not thousands of different cabinets and countertops to choose from, but knowing we were on a budget, we went to Home Depot which carries a couple different styles of in-stock products that are relatively inexpensive. Thankfully they had a white shaker style that we really liked. We ended up spending less than $2,000 on 12 cabinets (you also get a discount if you buy 10 or more of their in-stock cabinets).

For the countertops, we ended up choosing unfinished, in-stock butcher block counters. By purchasing them unfinished, we saved a few hundred dollars and only ended up spending $24 on two cans of satin wipe-on polyethylene.

3Shop sale appliances. Josh and I invested some serious time into finding the right appliances at the right price. I did a lot of online searching, then we checked 3 stores before settling on Best Buy. An associate worked with us to find a matching set within their sale items staying within our budget. Nobody ever tells you that buying appliances is like purchasing a car. Even paying cash, we were in the store for over 3 hours…so bring a snack!

Our kitchen is not the most unique, and if you walk down the aisles of Home Depot you will recognize a lot of their kitchen products in our kitchen, but I love it! I’ve been able to put my own twist to our kitchen with the open-shelving I built, vintage soda cans, antique scale, pops of red, and as my husband calls it, British racing green, paint. Best of all, we didn’t break our bank.