Kitchen Makeover Ideas without a Major Renovation

For the past 1.5 years my husband and I have been remodeling our kitchen and dining room area, so I wanted to show some kitchen makeover ideas and the process we went through. When we moved in three years ago I was so excited for our kitchen, it had everything that I have ever wanted in a kitchen: granite counter tops, nice cabinets, stainless steel appliances and a big pantry. Well as we started to change out some things and update it, it made me want to do more and more. One thing lead to another now finally I have it exactly how I want it to be and I absolutely love it!

Here is the before pictures, taken about three months after we had moved in. I decorated it with a fun framed mirror, changed out the chandelier and then added some subway vinyl art.

Here is another view of the kitchen. It was very dark and the black tile around the counter tops and back splash were especially dark :).

Like I said before, we started the process about 1.5 years ago and we would do a project and then wait a couple months and do another project. If you have the time and energy and money to do it all at once, I would it all at once :). I thought that I would share our process and then of course the end pictures of what it looks like now.

What started the whole process of redoing our kitchen/dining room was our dining table. It was too big for the space, so we made our own dining table.

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After making our table, we decided that we needed to brighten up the kitchen a little bit, so the first thing that we did to the kitchen was the back splash. If I were to do this again, I would definitely wait until I did the counters because we had to redo our back splash after replacing our counters.

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After we did the back splash, I dyed (yes dyed) our pendant lights turquoise.

Then I decided that the cabinets would look better if we had some hardware on them.

Seriously after the whole back splash there was a major snow ball effect because I did one thing right after another. With the new hardware, it made our kitchen faucet not look so great, so we replaced that too.

The kitchen staying this way for awhile (about 6 months) and then I had had enough of the dark cabinets, so we hired someone to paint the cabinets. If I were to paint them myself, I would do it like I did my cabinets in my bathroom (they had held up great!).

That’s when I decided to change out my bar stools too. I went from a stool with a back to a saddle stool that fit under the bar (I did that for space reasons). They were a dark brown but I painted them white (and then eventually two of them turquoise).

We had our kitchen like this for about 9 months and then we decided to add the shiplap wall.

And then after about 5 more months I decided it was time to change out the counter tops. And during that process I painted the walls and the ceilings.

It has been really fun to see our kitchen and dining room transform through out the years. I just love how it looks now. The process was long and a lot of work but worth every minute and penny! This goes to show you that you can update your kitchen without doing a major renovation. It’s amazing what some paint and some cosmetic changes can do to a room.

Here is the dining room now and everything fits a lot better in there now. Oh and if you have french door and don’t like curtains (my kids like to pull them down all the time) then you have to check out there french door curtains that we just found. They are awesome!

I just love how the white makes it look so much bigger and brighter. I had to replace my subway art vinyl when I painted the walls, so I decided to make a sign with the subway art and I LOVE it!

I love to have all the white but then some pops of color in there too.

This is one of my favorite views, it’s from my stairs. The bar is my favorite, I love how it looks with the new counters!

I dyed these pendant lights 1.5 years ago and they still look amazing and still make me smile whenever I see them. I love how they pop now with the white background.