Sensible Ideas for a Great New Kitchen

By Kathy McCleary, special to HGTV.com
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Designer and HGTV host Kenneth Brown adding a lot of style to a dated kitchen by painting the cabinets and removing one of the doors to create a display area.

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Come on, admit it. If you had unlimited funds to remodel your house, the first thing you’d do is build the kitchen of your dreams. I know that’s what I’d do. Our 50-year-old house has a beautiful kitchen space—a big, sunny room with lots of windows in the front corner of the house.

And it has been updated at least once in the past 50 years. But the update occurred at least 30 years ago, so I’ve got 30-year-old appliances and white laminate cabinets with dark oak trim and handles that look very 1970s, as well as speckled beige Formica countertops. The other problem is that I don’t have $43,800 on hand to pay for installing a new kitchen (that’s the average cost of a major kitchen remodel for a 200 square foot space using mid to upper range materials, according to the National Association of the Remodeling Industry).

"If you use really high end materials, it could cost a lot more," adds Gwen Biasi, NARI spokesperson. Even the average cost of a "minor" remodel logs in at the fairly substantial amount of $14,773. Much as I’d like to be one of the 4 million people remodeling their kitchens this year (NARI’s projected numbers for 2005), it doesn’t seem too likely. What I’d like to do in the meantime, though, is freshen it up, so it reflects our taste and style, and doesn’t give me high-school flashbacks every time I walk into the room. I also don’t want to spend $14,000, much less fork over $43,000. Which means that I’ve got to live with the cabinets and countertops, at the very least. So what can I do to bring my kitchen into the 21st century without dropping a 5-digit wad of cash?

I spoke to several design experts, including HGTV’s Kenneth Brown and Joan Kohn, as well as budget decorating guru and author of Quick Decorating Ideas Under $20: The Budget Decorators’ Bible Kathleen Wilson. Here are a few of their suggestions.

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Experts share the secrets to using color in your home in our Choose Color online feature.

Read Kathy McCleary's column on choosing a color palette.

Paint, Paint, Paint
"Paint is your best friend and your biggest bang for the buck," says Brown, a Los Angeles-based interior designer and host of reDesign on HGTV. Painting cabinets, including wooden cabinets, can completely transform a room. "It’s better to have a high-quality painted finish than a medium quality wood finish," adds Wilson.

Brown recalls one kitchen with ugly wood cabinets in a dark stain. "They were horrible," he says, "really bad. And it was the one thing the homeowners could not stand." Brown painted the frames of the cabinets a rich chocolate brown and painted the doors a soft taupe. He removed the doors from one cabinet, painted the inside chocolate brown and the shelves taupe, and used the space to display wineglasses and bright orange ceramic plates.

Wilson says painted faux finishes provide an expensive look for little money. Even vinyl flooring and laminate countertops can be painted to look like wood, marble or granite, says Wilson, as long as you use a high-quality primer made especially for non-porous surfaces and cover your paint job with four to five coats of polyurethane.

And don’t underestimate the impact of adding some color to your walls. "The biggest change you can make is to bring color into a kitchen," says Wilson, whose own kitchen is sage green, with blue accents.

Kohn, author of It’s Your Kitchen: Over 100 Inspirational Kitchens (Bulfinch, 2003), points out one of the biggest advantages of painting kitchen walls and cupboards: "You have to clean everything out. Then you can analyze what you need to do your work in the kitchen and get rid of the rest."