A $4,800 Transformation Makes a “Very Tight” Kitchen “Feel Twice as Big”
ABOUT THIS BEFORE & AFTER
HOME TYPE: Apartment
PROJECT TYPE: Kitchen
STYLE: Colorful, Eclectic
SKILL LEVEL: DIY, Professional
RENTAL FRIENDLY: No
If you’re a fan of traveling and artwork — and you find it difficult to source cool, curated-looking artwork — you might be interested in the concept of “ArtBNBs,” coined by interior designer Megan Lusher (@kalemdesignhouse). Megan owns vacation rentals around the world that she fills with artwork that visitors can see in situ and purchase for their own homes, if they wish.
One of her properties, part of a four-plex, took a lot of TLC before the accessorizing stage even began. “The kitchen before had been a rental for years and looked like it wasn’t well-maintained,” Megan describes. “It is a very tight space, but the layout was set up in a way that only left about one cabinet’s width of counter space. It also had a huge electrical panel right in the middle of the kitchen wall.”
On top of that, she disliked the lime-green cabinets, beige walls, and dirty linoleum floors in the four-plex’s kitchen. It was time for a makeover.
Moving an electrical panel allowed for a smarter layout.
“First was hiring an electrician to move the electric panel as far to the side as possible,” Megan says. “He couldn’t move it out of the kitchen within our budget, but we were at least able to move it so it wasn’t blocking potential counter space.” Moving the electrical panel allowed Megan, her husband, and her dad (who helped with the project) to arrange the kitchen in a galley layout.
“We were trying to take our budget as far as it would go by reusing existing cabinets,” Megan explains, but they ended up having room for one-and-a-half more cabinets. Megan says the new layout “feels twice as big” and has much more prep space and storage. “All the sudden, it felt like a proper kitchen and not just a rental with a hodgepodge of random cabinets and appliances.”
“The kitchen entryway had been lessened to allow for the dishwasher, so we undid this by widening the entry to full-width and bought a smaller dishwasher,” she adds.
The cabinet paint color is bold.
The two biggest difference-makers in this kitchen reno, Megan says, were space planning and paint. She chose Benjamin Moore’s Hearth Red for the cabinets and Simply White for the walls.
“I now am a firm believer that the smallest spaces let you go the boldest and biggest,” Megan says. “Picking the cabinet colors was such a terrifying choice, but I just love so, so much how it came out. The more we layered in there, the more it felt like a proper kitchen rather than just a tiny space with a fridge and oven.”
More cosmetic upgrades revived the rental kitchen.
Megan and her husband also added a metallic toe kick beneath the cabinets, a fabric skirt to one cabinet, butcher block countertops, sconces above the oven, and shiplap painted the same color as the cabinets. They swapped out the lighting and hardware and added peel-and-stick tile floors over the linoleum.
“My original plan was to reuse the existing floors,” Megan says. “In the original space, you could tell they were dated, but I was hoping just by being cleaned up they would be OK.”
However, she says, once the full space was painted, they “stuck out like a sore thumb.” Her marble-looking floor tiles “made such a huge difference,” she says. “The entire room instantly felt so bright and fresh with just the new walls and floor tiles.”
The finishing touch was — of course — the artwork throughout. For more ideas for how to incorporate artwork in a kitchen, check out these 16 ideas.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.
Further Reading
We Tested (and Rated!) Every Sofa at West Elm — Here Are the Best for Every Type of Need
See How a Stager Used Paint to Transform a 1950s Living Room
