Ugly Kitchen: You Have Seen Your Last Days

You know the drill: girl buys cheap condo, girl hates decor, girl renovates condo. The thing I hate the most about my condo, besides the increasingly high HOA dues, is the ugly, ugly kitchen. "Custom kitchen, beautiful cherry cabinets, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops". Sounds like a dream, right? Wrong. This is one of my favorite design mistakes that people make: throw a bunch of "higher-end" elements together and it must create a fabulous space. Not necessarily.

God, as they say, is in the details. Let's break it down shall we? You have a developer. The developer wants to renovate the apartment complex that he's just purchased with the hopes of converting it into condominium units. The developer wants to promote his units as "high-end" without spending "high-end" dollars. The result? He buys the cheapest granite, the cheapest cabinetry and the cheapest stainless steel appliances, throws it all together without giving a thought about how it works as a whole, and voila! Instant high-end crap.

The granite countertops that came with my condo are just about the most ugly species of granite one could find. Pretty much a mix of yellow with a little bit of black and brown. The edge detail is the cheapest to construct, and of course, the ugliest too - the full bullnose. Blech! A simple eased edge would have been SO much better. The cabinets are also smoke and mirrors. Advertised as "cherry stained wood", they are in fact, not solid wood at all. The doors are a thin veneered panel, about 1/4" thick, with a shaker wood band detail around the sides. The band is the only part of the cabinets that is actually solid wood. The side panels are the worst part - wood grain laminate!!! So these "custom" wood cabinets are in fact made up of very little wood. They will be painted, and fast.

The appliances are ok, although I would have preferred a counter-depth refrigerator, or at least for the millwork to surround it in a way that makes sense.

So how do you take an ugly kitchen and make it less ugly - on a budget? The answer is paint, and lots of it! First the cabinets (and those ugly laminate side panels) will be painted a lovely shade of off-white, Behr's "Popped Corn", in a high-gloss finish. Then, the lackluster hardware will be replaced with something a little more modern, Ikea's Lansa hardware. Small kitchens are great because you can invest in a few higher-end materials in smaller quantities. The finishing touch will be a new full-height mosaic tile backsplash above the range and counter, in a tile something like this. PS - sorry for the crappy image, my scanner isn't the greatest. As for those granite countertops, well, it's not in the budget to replace them anytime soon, so I have painted the walls surrounding the open kitchen a deep teal blue, which helps downplay the countertops. Stay tuned for the final results...