How far do you think your next $100 can go if you're looking to renovate your place? According to one woman's testimony, the answer appears to be as far as taking care of one entire room.
According to Imgur user ElizaB, it took just two weeks and a Benjamin to get a drastically different look for her apartment's kitchen, which she chose to remodel after her roommate moved out.
Eliza wrote,
I had a roommate who cooked like Jackson Pollock and cleaned like a blind toddler so I knew anything I did to the kitchen would just be covered in beer and marinara sauce a week later. I put up with this for two years before it occurred to me that I didn't have to live like this. So, long story short, she moved out and I went nuts with a shit ton of Simple Green and diatomaceous earth.
The original image of her kitchen looked dull and dim.
But after only two weekends of work, it looked bright and welcoming.
So, how exactly did she do it? Well, here's how Eliza broke it down for everyone.
Walls
Eliza got rid of the neutral, beige-like color of her kitchen and brought on a new, teal-ish color with a little help from Sherwin-Williams.
I don't have any pictures of painting the walls because who takes pictures of that? The color is Waterscape by Sherwin Williams.
She then moved on to her cabinets, priming and painting the insides of the doors while they were still hanging, simply because she had a feeling that she might quit her renovation project prematurely.
Eliza wrote,
I'm always worried that I'm going to get bored in the middle of a project and abandon it. This way, I could just close the cabinets and pretend it never happened.
Clearly, though, she went through with the project.
Cabinets
So, when it was time to do the outside of the cabinets, she did some cleaning work and sanding. Of course, she brought on the Sherwin-Williams paint again.
Basically I scrubbed the shit out of the cabinets--we don't have an extractor fan so everything was covered in two years of a dust/cooking oil sludge and this step made me want to die. Then I sanded everything with a power sander and a sanding sponge, vacuumed off the sawdust and slapped on a coat of Kilz. Then over the Kilz, I did two coats of SW Pro-Classic in Snowbound because that's what the guy at the store recommended.
Floor
Taking care of the floor turned out to be the most trying process for Eliza. First, she decided that she didn't want to spend over $1 per square foot. With that criteria, the Woodland Oak Style Selection planks at Lowe's did the trick.
She then chose a specific pattern that she wanted. But laying it down became the most complicated part.
Eliza wrote,
Note about floor prep: This was the most annoying part of the whole project. The internet has all kinds of conflicting information... I decided to trust the minority of random internet people who said it was cool to just stick the planks right on top of the old vinyl because it sounded like much less work than the alternatives, so, you know, yolo.
In the end, she found a way to make it happen. And the best part is, it didn't cost her an arm and a leg.
Citations: Imgur, Cosmopolitan
