Fabulous Facelift

Get Beyond The Brown

Your cabinets may be an unappealing shade of brown right now, and not resemble anything remotely au courant, but you need to get past the current state and focus on what they might become. A single homogeneous shade can be re-worked into a multi-toned palette that enables you to breathe new life into a drab old shell. Keeping what you’ve got also does not mean that all must remain the same. While dark wood-toned islands have been a recurring kitchen trend for a decade, we opted to bid adieu to all the brown and infuse a lighter, brighter blue hue as the compliment to creamy white cabinetry. Why not be a bit daring on the island? It’s a small area, isn’t a huge investment and can easily be changed to a safer shade if the urge ever strikes.

Get A Pretty Patchwork Going On The Floor

When you’re looking to make big changes in an existing space, knowing your limits is key. These limits can encompass both budget and material selection if you’re aiming for the best end result. If you’re looking to replace old sheet linoleum you need to be mindful of the how the cabinets are constructed. Changing the floor while keeping the cabinets means you need to install your new floor choice in and around the existing cabinets. Changing to a stone tile floor would raise the overall height of the tiled areas and reduce the baseboards, not to mention that it also costs about twice the price of other options. Since I was hankering for a retro diner vibe, we opted for Marmoleum click floor tiles. With a marbled, easy-care finish and more than a dozen fun colours to choose from, why limit yourself to just one colour? Once installed, our trio of flooring tiles looks as pretty as a patchwork quilt!

Bring It Up To Date With Hardware

One of the biggest detractors in a days gone by kitchen is generally the hardware. If you’ve got face-mounted hinges (as opposed to the hidden variety that are commonly used now) and want to swap ’em out, you just need to take a sample of the existing hinge and match the size in a new finish and style. You’ll also want to switch up the knobs and handles to bring every detail up to date – just make sure you choose the new fittings before you spray the doors in a fresh finish so you know whether the screw holes from the old hardware need to be patched and covered. Trust me when I say, there are many different spacing widths in cabinetry handles and it’s not always easy to find a match to what you’ve got.

Shuffle The Task Areas

If you’re replacing counters, be sure to rethink the workflow. With the help of a handy carpenter, you can make changes and reconfigure the layout slightly, enabling you to fully realize the kitchen of your dreams. We shuffled sink, range and refrigerator to better the basic task areas, then created a seating area at the island by eliminating underutilized storage cabinets and some wasted space. With the addition of some replacement panelling, we tied the new look to the old, and created all the areas on our client’s wish list.

The Save

If you’re repainting the entire kitchen, it’s easy to tweak a few storage details, then unify them with the magic of paint. No one will ever know they weren’t there to begin with! To fill a void in a window to an adjoining area, I discovered that stair treads provide an easy answer to floating shelves. At over an inch thick, 12 inches deep, 48 inches long, and a whopping $14 each, these ready-to-go shelves from the building materials aisle of the big box store make it easy to install open display shelves.

The Splurge

According to my math (and my way of rationalizing expenditures), what you save in one area should be available for reallocation where it makes the most effective design statement. Why not splurge on great new counters to tie your new look together? Quartz composite counters come in many colours and combinations. With a flecked design that combined all our chosen colours (including a glint of metal), and a look vaguely reminiscent of terrazzo floors, I felt this material had just the right amount of retro to bridge the old and the new in this re-imagined kitchen.

The Signature Sarah

If you want your newly redecorated kitchen to have realistic retro roots, you need to add some authentic elements to the mix. Vintage machine-age stools provide a place to perch at the newly created island bar, and cool metal accents in lighting and dining add a sleek style infusion to our ethereal palette. Without these steely touches, the end result might have taken a country departure, but a touch of metal brings polish to a simple kitchen overhaul.