While inheriting a family home can be a beautiful thing, it can become complicated if renovations are needed. You might find yourself wondering how to honor the generations that came before you while also making upgrades for function and style. That’s the exact balance Brittany sought to pull off when she renovated the 116-square-foot kitchen in her home, which her grandfather built.
“The cabinets dominated the room with traditional orange-y yellow stain,” Brittany says. “I couldn’t take the knotty pine overload anymore! However, they were hand-built by my grandfather and local carpenters when he built the house in 1956, so I did not want to rip them out for poorly made new composite cabinets.”
Still, Brittany was ready to freshen the room up, as the knotty pine cabinets were paired with the kitchen’s 1980s single-sheet laminate flooring. First, she had new flooring professionally installed, and then she gave her kitchen a more contemporary look with DIY upgrades.
The kitchen reno kicked off with a new dishwasher.
“This project all started because the sliding rails were broken on all three drawers in the kitchen,” Brittany says. “I was going to demo them and put a small drawered cabinet in their place, when it was suggested to me to put a dishwasher in their place.”
Brittany’s advice for installing new appliances is that it’s easier to fit something slightly too small into a too-large opening and add trim to cover the gap than wedge something too big in — something she learned during the dishwasher installation.
Sanding the cabinets got rid of the yellow-orange tint.
Brittany originally planned to do an antique white stain on the kitchen’s upper cabinets — but after sanding them, she actually ended up liking the original cabinet color (without the orange varnish). “The intricate groove pattern on the cabinet faces took much longer to sand than I had anticipated,” Brittany recalls, and her brother, Joe, and boyfriend, Kyle, helped her.
“Ultimately, we ended up putting only a clear polyurethane coat on the upper cabinets to eliminate the orange but still let the natural wood shine through,” she adds. She recommends testing wood stains before committing — after she did so on a small piece of spare wood, she found that using a white stain on the cabinets yielded “more of a driftwood look than just a light cottage feel.”
Brittany painted the kitchen’s lower cabinets in Sherwin-Williams’ Privilege Green, and she gave the hardware a quick refresh, too. “Instead of purchasing new hardware, I removed it, let it soak in a degreaser, and then spray-painted it black,” she says. “It has held up great for 10-plus months.”
Goodbye to the sink scallops.
One of Brittany’s favorite parts of the redo was getting rid of the scalloped panels above the sink. “Creating that vertical space makes the whole area look taller and less cramped,” she says. She loves the new light fixture, too — she had to remove the old canned lights and patch the holes to install it.
“The overall lighter, brighter feel of the room makes me so happy,” she adds. “I love to cook, and being in there reminds me of cooking with my grandmother when I was younger, so it feels great to have a space that is updated and fresh yet still feels familiar.”