Renovate a Kitchen For Just 2,500!

If you become a canny shopper, you can do a great job updating a kitchen on £2,500. This is especially true if you are a landlord and updating a kitchen to attract new tenants!

Most people don’t realize that the carcasses of many kitchens (ie the drawers and cupboards behind the door frontages) are actually fine, so there is no need to change them. The doors and drawer frontages can be painted, but sometimes this doesn’t look ‘quite right’ and it’s a lot better to buy door and drawer fronts, and worktops. Renovating your kitchen in this way can make it look like you’ve spent £10,000, not £2,500! If you can’t use the old carcasses, don’t despair. If you look in local newspapers, visit DIY and local kitchen manufacturers or look on-line, it’s surprising how many people buy a kitchen then sell it on again as they’ve found a new one, or DIY stores offer some great reductions on end of range kitchens that still look good.

Worktops are incredibly important to get right, especially if you have tenants. Granite ‘look a likes’ can look fantastic, but fake versions can also easily scratch and look old and used within months. Ideally choose a hard wearing worktop that can be easily renovated if the surface is scratched. Better still, make sure you spend some money on a decent chopping board that’s within easy reach and easy to clean so that you don’t have to replace the worktop too regularly.

With sinks, white butler sinks always look fantastic but are actually very hard to keep clean and renovate. Stainless steel sinks are much easier to clean and if they are a mess, there are lots of products that can quickly renovate them to look like new!

Replacing your tiles is a relatively easy job. Ideally go to a local tile shop, even the discount tile warehouses have great looking tiles at really good prices. It’s important to avoid cheap tiles that crack easily when fitting, so make sure they are not too thin. Don’t go for a complex pattern either as that will cost more to fit if you aren’t doing it yourself and quickly become outdated. Better stick to one type of tile and if you want to paint it later on, you can do so.

Finally, if you need to update your flooring, go for vinyl and avoid laminate or wooden flooring. Vinyl is much more hard wearing and many come with good guarantees of 10-15 or more years and it’s incredibly easy to replace. The photography that is used to put the pattern on vinyl flooring has improved greatly over the last few years, so it’s definitely worth a look.