Our 5-day budget kitchen makeover!

Ever given yourself the target of making over an entire room in 5 DAYS? That’s exactly what we did.

In Dec 2021, COVID finally caught up with us and we tested positive on the 12th December. This meant our holiday to New York on the 13th was off and cancelled.

But rather than spend our 10 days of isolation in misery and pining after our dream holiday that wasn’t meant to be, we decided to kick off a project we’d talked about for a long time – a budget kitchen transformation.

 

When we first moved into our house, we discussed what we could do to the kitchen to give it a makeover, but it was hard not to get carried away with crazy ideas. Whenever we discussed it, we’d say “Let’s retile!”, “Let’s replace the sink!”, “Let’s redo all the work surfaces!”. But this would have taken the project almost from a temporary budget makeover to a whole new kitchen.

We know that in the future we want to either extend the house slightly or knock a couple of internal walls down to make a large, open plan family living space. This meant anything we did to the kitchen would be temporary and removed in just a few short years.

The one thing we did want to change was the floor. Carpet tiles, in a kitchen? Super unhygienic, very hard to clean and not ideal when you have two cats coming in and out of the cat flap with muddy paws.

So once we’d cancelled our entire holiday, it was time to put a plan together.

*This guide contains affiliate links which means I may earn a small commission should you make a purchase after clicking it.

1. Plan your budget kitchen makeover

After spending 4 of our 10 isolation days in bed with COVID, we realised we had just 5 days left to bring our kitchen ideas to life. We settled on just replacing the floor and painting the cabinets in the 5 days we had, and plan to paint the tiles in the future.

Planning is SO important if you want to stick to your budget and decide on what is going to be changed and what isn’t.

The first thing I did on the first day of isolation was get some paint samples ordered. We needed to make decisions very quickly for this project, which I am NOT good at. We knew we had a limited time to get started and needed to account for the time it took for various items to be delivered (contact-free, of course).

Jay was adamant about replacing the worktops, but I was adamant that we could save the money and instead makeover the kitchen to compliment the surfaces instead. I therefore needed a colour that would do just this and so I settled on these two:

They’re very similar, but we settled on Puppy Paws by Valspar, purely because it felt slightly warmer and less grey than Sahara Dust, and went with the worktops a little better.

Next it was time to choose the floor. We wanted a click-together laminate and we didn’t want to spend too much money. I opted for a slightly darker floor that has a gorgeous warm tone without being too orange.

 

2. Paint the kitchen units

To really change the space, the next part of the budget kitchen makeover was to paint the units. They were, as you can see above, quite dark and very orange. They had multiple stains on them from various things (cooking splatters being the number 1 culprit).

Common sense decrees that the cabinets needed painting first before installing the new floor. Below, you can find out exactly how we painted our units.

How to paint your wooden kitchen units

You will need:

• Microfibre cloths
• A kitchen sponge or scourer
• Sugar soap*
• Mini rollers
• Good quality paint brushes
• Your chosen wood paint

We removed all the doors and hinges, labelling them as we went to ensure we knew exactly where they needed to go back on.

Top Tip: label your doors where the hinges go so the numbers won’t be seen when it’s all reinstalled.

Each one got a thorough clean with sugar soap*. This is one of the best things you can use as it removes any grease.

To clean them, I filled a bucket with warm water and added about a third of the bottle of sugar soap, giving it a good mix to create some bubbles. I used a kitchen sponge to clean the cabinets down, using the scourer side to really scrub them clean.

Now all the doors are clean, labelled and out of the way, we could focus on painting the main units.

We decided to paint the parts that you could clearly see, even with the drawers and doors closed. Therefore, we gave four coats of paint on all these small strips of wood:

 

Things certainly got a lot messier before they got better!

Next, it was time to paint the doors themselves. We don’t like to do jobs by halves, so we painted the insides of the doors too, wanting to erase any hint at the orange colour the kitchen was previously.

We started by painting the back side of every door, using a workbench to place the door on and a roller to evenly spread the paint.

A roller is definitely the best thing to use. It gives a super smooth finish and puts a slightly heavier layer of paint on. While we didn’t want very heavy layers, a paintbrush was leaving a very thin, streaky finish. We used the mini rollers from B&Q*.

Because our doors had a shaker-style effect with an inner panel, we had to use a paint brush to get in all the nooks and crannies and then finished with the roller. Each door was left to dry face up on a dust sheet.

In total, we applied 3 coats of paint to the back of the doors.

This took us to the end of Day 2. Day 1 was spent cleaning and preparing, and Day 2 was spent painting the strips of wood inside the units and the backs of the doors.

If you want to see the video of how we painted everything, you can see in my Instagram reel.

On Day 3 and 4, we went through the same process, painting all the fronts of the doors. This time, we gave them 4 coats to ensure maximum protection against water and food spills.

 

This image shows how the colour really looks – it’s a gorgeous pinky/peach/cream colour that goes so well with the worktops and makes them look marginally better than they did.

Painting definitely took a longer time than I imagined, mainly because of the time you need to wait for the paint to dry between coats.

But I managed to crack on with some other things in the meantime, like cleaning and spraying the handles.

3. Replace or refresh the old handles

I was quite happy that the handles in our kitchen were fairly modern, but I did want to spray them to make them a little warmer. The rest of the kitchen was taking on this warm cream/peach tone, and I needed the handles to match.

Before spraying, I gave them a thorough clean.

I put all the handles and screws in a tupperware with some white vinegar, a bit of dish soap and boiling water. I left them to sit overnight to really allow the white vinegar to work its magic.

This left a lot of disgusting dirt floating in the top by morning, so I rinsed all the parts off, refilled the tupperware with warm water and dish soap and used a toothbrush to gently rub each handle.

 

Look at the difference!

Once they were clean and dry, it was time to spray them with metal paint. I used an all-purpose spray paint* on a relatively dry day, spraying the handles outside and bringing them in to dry.

The best way to spray your handles is to attach them to some kind of cardboard so you can spray them all together and ensure that you can reach every part without needing to touch them.

 

See how now they’re all upright and easy to carry without damaging them? I took them outside and sprayed them evenly with a few coats of the metal spray.

3. Replace the floor

With the units painted and the handles sprayed, the messiest part of the budget kitchen makeover was complete, so it was time to start laying the floor. I couldn’t wait to get those old carpet tiles up and some of them even had black mould growing underneath them.

We decided, again to save money and save ourselves a big job, to leave the underlay that was already down below the carpet tiles. The laminate could be laid straight on top of this and it made us happy knowing that the floor was already flat.

If I was doing a budget kitchen makeover and my floor wasn’t too bad, or was lino/tiles, I would keep it as it is. We just HAD to replace that carpet, and this was the most expensive part of the kitchen update.

 

Things definitely got messier again while we were doing the floor. The worst part was where the washing machine and dishwasher were. These had to be pulled out in order to do the floor.

 

Once this bit was done, we could move the appliances back in and get the rest of the flooring laid a little more easily. The floor was so easy to put together, and we used a circular saw to cut the sections that needed cutting. The hardest part was making awkward cuts around skirting and door frames.

We’d previously removed some of the kickboards as they were damaged. Jay had a genius idea of using the remaining flooring as kickboards, and I love the way it looks!

Once the floor was done, we got the units back on, installed the new kickboards, and our kitchen started to look a little more like a kitchen again.

   

The Finished Kitchen!

I cannot believe what we achieved in our remaining 5 days of isolation. Thanks go to Wickes who offered FREE next day delivery on the floor, and Jay’s stepdad for getting our click and collect order from B&Q and leaving it on our doorstep.

While the tiles still let the whole space down, I cannot believe this is the same kitchen.

   

Questions about our kitchen as asked by you!

What are your long term kitchen plans?

As I mentioned in my introduction, every change we have made is temporary because eventually we want to create a large family space that contains a kitchen, dining and living space. With this layout, we would be able to retain our closed off lounge that can be used for when we have guests over and want to escape the mess of the kids’ toys!

We will absolutely be knocking down the wall between our kitchen and dining room (the wall on the right in the below photo), whether we extend or not. The dining table rarely gets used and I think it’s because we don’t like the feeling of sitting in a closed room to eat.

 

Doing this could double our kitchen size and make the space so much more usable.

We also have a weird half of the kitchen that I suppose would be used for a small dining table, but it’s where we have our fridge and tumble dryer at the moment.

 

When we open up the space, the plan would be to turn this into a utility room and pantry. It would mean having the washing machine and tumble dryer out of the way of the kitchen, a place for the cat’s litter tray and room for a pantry still. This makes a lot of sense, particularly as the stairs slope upwards here.

What products did you use?

The products we used to renovate the kitchen include:

• Valspar’s wood and metal paint* in colour ‘Puppy Paws’
• Various paintbrushes and rollers, including these paint rollers*
• Sugar soap*
• Bergen oak laminate flooring from Wickes
• Bergen oak flooring trim for around the edges of the room
• Multi-purpose spray paint in colour ‘Champagne’

How did you keep it on a budget?

We chose not to do anything that didn’t desperately need doing. The stainless steel sink, while not the most attractive, is fine. The worktops were in great condition, so we chose to keep them rather than replace them. We did discuss using a vinyl wrap but I thought that over time that would get scratched and peel away, whereas our work surface wouldn’t and is currently heat resistant.

I think to really stick to a budget, you need to avoid making big changes to your room that aren’t needed. We’ve toyed with the idea of retiling, but decided it’s not worth the large price tag or the extra mess. Painting the tiles mean we can use what we have and spend about £50 instead of £350+.

The flooring was the most expensive part, but even then, we stuck to relatively cheap laminate instead of choosing luxury tiles or solid wood.

I’d like to think we’re renowned at Dream of Home for doing budget renovations and budget interiors! If you need any inspo on how to keep things cheap, take a look at some of my other budget projects and design ideas.

How much did it cost in total?

We didn’t set an exact cost before doing the project, but we knew that we wanted to keep as many features as possible (sink, worktops, etc.) and that we ultimately wanted to change the floor and paint the units/tiles.

The flooring from Wickes came in at £19.24 per box, which covered about 1.48 metres squared. We ordered 14 boxes, which was actually too many but we thought we might use the leftover to do our downstairs loo in the same floor. We also bought 10m of trim/beading for around the edge of the room and two new threshold pieces.

• Flooring: £269.36
• Trim: £30
• New thresholds: £12

Typically, the flooring is currently on offer at £17.76 instead.

We had most things like paintbrushes and roller sets already in the house, but we needed paint and sugar soap.

• Paint from Valspar*: £35
• Sugar soap: £3.28
• Spray paint for the handles: £7.39

Therefore the total cost of this budget kitchen makeover was £357.03!

I’m yet to paint the tiles, and this could add an extra £50 or so on top for the paint, but all-in-all, I think it was well worth it for the results.

What are you doing with your pantry?

I would LOVE to makeover our pantry. We did actually put laminate in all the way to the back, so the floor in there is done. Currently, I don’t feel that there’s enough shelving or that it’s properly utilised, so I’d love to fill it with glass containers that are all perfectly labelled. I could make use of the door and store things on that too, like spices on a spice rack.

I’d also love to replace that door, but this again came down to budget. Unfortunately, it’s a very long and narrow door, so not a standard size and potentially not that easy to replace.

I hope you love our kitchen as much as I do! Keep up to date with what’s happening, as I’ll be publishing more articles soon about how to paint your kitchen and how to paint your tiles.

You can read about our budget kitchen makeover in our last house over on House Beautiful, who kindly featured our project!