Ideas for Updating Your Kitchen Cabinets
Print View
Total views: 546
The cabinets in a kitchen usually cover so much wall space that if they are outdated they can easily make the whole kitchen look outdated. Rather than replacing your cabinets, try some of these easy, inexpensive ways to make them more modern and attractive.
A fresh coat of paint can really modernize and refresh cabinets. When choosing your paint color, keep in mind the size of your kitchen. Dark colors tend to make a room seem smaller while light colors can make it feel larger. If you have a small kitchen you would probably want to paint your cabinets a lighter shade to keep it from feeling too closed in. Also be sure to choose a semi-gloss paint for the cabinet doors rather than flat or satin. Cabinet doors can get really grimy from greasy fingers or just the grease in the air from cooking, so you want to use a paint that is washable and easy to clean.
Another fast, easy and inexpensive way to modernize your cabinets is to update the hardware. Simply replacing your cabinet door handles and your drawer pulls can quickly update the look of many older cabinets without a lot of money out of pocket. They make cabinet hardware in a huge variety of styles, shapes and colors these days, so be sure to shop around and find something you truly love.
If you are more ambitious and good with tools, try cutting the centers of your cabinet doors out using a jigsaw so that you are left with just the frame of your cabinet door. You can then cover the hole in the door with a wide variety of materials. If you are going for a modern kitchen, try using a piece of colored acrylic attached to the back of the cabinet door across the hole. If you are going for a country kitchen, consider streching chicken wire over the opening. Be creative and have fun with this since there are lots of fun possibilities for every decorating taste.
If your cabinet doors have insets in the middle, you can tile inside the inset. Measure how deep the inset in the door is, then shop for tiles that are about the same thickness. You can either just tile the doors with straight tiles, or get a little more creative and make a mosaic on them. When you are done laying the tile, just grout them, paint the edges of the doors, and hang them back up for instant impact. Any kind of non-porous tile will work well for this...from ceramic tile to stone tile. It's amazing how much class tile can add to your doors, and they will look like custom cabinets for a fraction of the price you would spend to replace them.
If you don't want to paint your cabinets, you can't afford new hardware for them, and you aren't ambitious enough to try the other projects, at least give them a good scrubbing. Kitchens tend to accumulate a lot of grime from the grease from cooking, so sometimes just cleaning your cabinets really well can brighten and refresh them.