We spend a significant amount of our lives in the kitchen. How you feel about setting up your kitchen can influence your mood, as well as impact your hygiene, and your diet.
If walking into your kitchen brings you gloom and irritation, maybe it’s time to consider a revamp. Upgrading your cabinets is an easy way to freshen up the room. Here are some other tips and tricks to improve your kitchen:
Tips and tricks for renovating your cabinets
You don’t need to spend a lot of money on a revamp. In fact, you don’t even need to get a whole new set of cabinets. You can simply tweak your existing space with ready-to-assemble storage racks for better organization.
Alternatively, you can reface or repaint your existing cabinet doors and upgrade the shelving if the existing frames are structurally sound.
Here are a few ways you can use woodworking to give your kitchen a new lease of life…
Deal with the grimy old doors
Use a drill to remove the doors from their hinges and remove them from the cabinets. Label them as you put them down so you know exactly where they need to be attached when you’re done.
Clean the doors and shelves with a good degreaser and dry them with a cloth before leaving them to air. Remove the hinges and knobs and clean them as well before applying metallic paint and allow them to dry.
Reface damaged spaces
Some new doors and some veneer can work wonders for aging shelves and doors. You can get new doors at very reasonable prices through local woodworking companies, or spruce with peel and stick veneer.
Measure carefully before you start cutting so you can keep your renovation project running smoothly.
Install pull-out shelves to maximize storage
A pull-out cabinet shelf can replace your existing ones and allow easy access to items stored at the back of the cabinet.
You can visit a home center or lumber yard that sells quarter or half sheets of plywood and cut the plywood to your dimensions. Most places will even cut them for you, so be sure to measure the inside of the shelves before you leave home.
Get a palm sander to make life easier
As you embark on your non-professional woodworking expedition, a palm sander will be an extremely useful tool for refacing and sanding pull-out shelves. This will help you smooth curves and edges easily.
Add side-boards, racks, center block table and more
Your kitchen is where you spend most of your time, relaxing, preparing and eating meals. Therefore, it is important to make this place your happy. You can do this by organizing everything, such as plates, pans, pots, etc. so that they are easy to reach and keep clean.
The sideboards not only provide extra space for storing your dishes, table linen and other miscellaneous items, but their surface can be useful as an extra work surface.
Shelves can make storing your plates and pots much easier. Just try it and you will know how much less frustrating the thought of setting the table for meals becomes. A small butcher block in the center of a separate island is also handy. A kitchen island was common in traditional kitchens and is making a comeback in modern cooking stations, thanks to the availability of retailers and furniture makers that offer dozens of options in terms of ‘ materials and styles. You can even build one yourself from easy-to-buy materials if you’re up for some more interesting woodworking experiments.
Paint your kitchen cabinets
Once you’ve completed your refacing and assembled the shelves, racks and other furniture, it’s time to paint. You can complement your kitchen cabinets with alternative colors or keep them all one color.
The aim here is to brighten up the space so choose light and cheerful colours. Once you have finished the doors, move on to the shelves, racks and other furniture, and then leave them to dry for a few hours. You can apply a protective coating over the paint to make them last for years to come.
Other accessories
Consider adding hidden light fixtures that can be retrofitted under wall hanging cabinets. They are a great way to add atmosphere to the kitchen and are also useful when you are chopping and dicing and reading recipes on the countertop.
To add character to your cabinets, you can easily attach crown molding on your cabinet fittings that can be attached using a frame without much delay.
Once your DIY renovation is complete, you can look forward to spending many happy hours in your revamped kitchen. Have fun!
