As we head into the new year, my family is also heading into the 2nd year of living in our home.  When we moved in we immediately repainted 80% of the house.  This past year, we repainted our office, play room aka dining room, living room and then added new floors that put us up to about 90%.

Now, I am redecorating my son’s room into a preschool/big boy room and moving out the baby stuff.  As soon as I get that done, I’m going to have pictures with lots of ideas for you, stay tuned!

Then, my husband is going to be working on a bookshelf project to put in our playroom to replace the armoire, which you can see below.  The piano has also returned to the living room unlike shown in this picture.

After that, the only thing left, the biggest project we will attempt…the kitchen!

In saying all this about updates, the main focus this year is the kitchen.  We are DIY people so there will be no contractors or anyone involved but us and several trips to Lowe’s.  We have no plans of ripping things apart, but I do have plans of painting the cabinets, pulling wallpaper off the walls, adding a chalkboard wall or some type of menu planning area.  I also may have my husband make a built in L Shape bench for a breakfast nook.  We also need organization in our cabinets, it’s dangerous to open any of our cabinets for fear of getting clobbered with Tupperware!

I also plan to redo the pantry.  Currently it’s a few shelves on the wall with doors on them and the doors are terrible.  Those will be going.  I have no idea what to replace it with but I am racking my brain trying to come up with ideas.  I will say I had no pantry in the last house, so I am more than thankful for this one…it just needs a little TLC.

I thought I would start asking you what ideas do you have for a budget friendly kitchen update?

We have every intention of doing this entire update for under $200-300 if that!  I will be keeping you posted and will show a final post of what we did before and after with the cost breakdown, at least that is my hope!

Here is a picture of a kitchen update that we did at our old house.  This house was built in the 50′s most of it I believe was original some was added in the 70′s.  It basically was all blue!

For less than about $100 we turned our all blue kitchen into a cute kitchen perfect for this particular house.  I decided to use wallpaper since I really did not want to pull all of what was already there off, but we went with the coffee theme.  We distressed the cabinets, then for the counter-tops we purchased wood planks, stained them and applied them right over the existing counter-top.  They basically were similar to a butcher block.  Next, we did a bead board on the back-splash.

My mom actually did this kitchen with our minimal $100 budget.  It was a perfect solution when adding an entirely new kitchen would not have been wise in relation to the worth of the home.

So, there you have it, that is our home project that we have going on right now.  I am anxious to get a game plan and get started!

Stay tuned for more on a kitchen update.

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