Home renovations are a necessary evil that can be both expensive and time consuming. As a landlord, it’s important to continuously update your property. An updated property is more sought after and will attract more potential tenants as well as home buyers. Making your property more attractive can also have a huge impact on the overall value of your home.

As you know we are owners of a 4-family home and have slowly been updating each unit. Our most recent update was our kitchen and we’re going to share with you all the juicy details from before and after pictures to total cost breakdown. After reading this you will learn how to transform your kitchen for under $500. Sure, we may not have brand new appliances or granite countertops but the visual appeal is 10x what it previously was. Anyways, let’s dive in. 🙂

Before Updates

Here’s a look at our kitchen before any updates. As you can see, it wasn’t a disaster but some updates were definitely necessary. Before we started anything we wrote down everything that needed to be changed/updated:

• Laminate countertop needed to go as well as laminate backsplash.
• Cabinets needed fresh new paint, new hardware, and liners on the inside.
• Upgrade stove to newer model.
• Paint all the kitchen walls.

With all of this in mind we definitely had our work cut out for us. Gina and I are by no means handy people but we knew we could tackle this project. However, just for shits and giggles we decided to get a professional quote.

Professional Quote

Based on the criteria above we contacted two kitchen remodeling professionals to give us their best quote. To no surprise both contractors tried to sell us on brand new cabinets, new countertops, high end backsplash, and a fancy new sink. All in with material & labor we were quoted at $4,500 at the low end and $7,500 on the high end. Needless to say we did not accept either quotes and decided to tackle this project ourselves.

Breakdown of Costs

After watching a number of Youtube videos and strolling the aisles of home depot like lost children we finally made some decisions. We decided that our overall goal was durability and our budget was going to be $500.

Stove

With such a low budget a new stove was out of the picture. Instead, we decided to stick with the stove we had and put the word out to our network that we were looking for a newer electric stove. To our surprise our network came through and we were able to swap our old stove for a newer stove completely free! Talk about a cost savings:)

Back Splash

As I mentioned before Gina and I are no Macgyver, so our backsplash install had to be within our skill set. Luckily enough we discovered sticky tile which looks great, is fairly cheap, and easy to install. All in we spent $150 on sticky tile and now have a beautiful “brick” backsplash.

Countertop

In order to stay within our budget we decided not to install a new countertop and went with a wood patterned contact paper instead. Again this was fairly easy to apply and cost a fraction of the price with a total cost of $58.

Cabinet Supplies

For the cabinet upgrade we installed new handles and cabinet liners. The total cost for these items was about $45.

Paint Supplies

For this project we needed two gallons of paint, two 9″ rollers, two 3″ rollers, one 2″ brush, one 4″ brush, and two paint trays. All of this cost us $112 which brought our total project cost to $365.

We managed to complete this project under budget by $135. Compared to the low end professional quote we saved $4,135!

The Finished Product

Closing Thoughts

This small renovation has completely transformed the appearance of our kitchen and we managed to save thousands. A few things that I want you to take away from this article:

1. If you can do a renovation yourself you can save big time.
2. Never underestimate the power of your network.
3. Painting cabinets is a process and your kitchen is going to be a disaster for a couple of days.
4. A renovation does not have to be expensive to transform a room

I really hope you enjoyed this article and are now inspired to take on some of your home projects 🙂

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