Small Changes Make a Big Impact

As I've said before, sometimes small changes to a room can have a much larger impact than the effort and money put into them. Such was the case with my kitchen. Our house was built by one of the large national builders. As anyone who has ever built a home with one of that sort of builder knows, the "options" really rack up, and the price they charge for some items is just ridiculous, particularly kitchen upgrades. ($700 just to add crown to the cabinets? Puh-leeze!) So while our kitchen was large and bright, the cabinets lacked any detail and just looked like cheap boxes hung on the wall. (A shame, because they were actually nice, real wood cabinets.)

When the house was brand new. The cabinets looked short and cheap.

Painting the kitchen a warm orangey/terra cotta color helped warm it up, but the cabinets just weren't "popping."

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After paint. (The color is not quite so saturated as the picture indicates.)

So I decided to do something about it. I tracked down the maker of the cabinetry, and a few phone calls later, had ordered matching crown molding, a taller cabinet for over the range, and had one of their installers on the way to the house. Once he had installed the new cabinet and trim, $80 bucks worth of oil-rubbed bronze hardware and a half hour with the drill finished the space off. And the results were dramatic:

The trim really gave the cabinets a level of detail they needed. And the taller cabinet over the range made the kitchen look much higher-end.

The new cabinet and trim cost less than $500--a fraction of what the builder wanted just to add the crown!

As always, I am linking up to the Metamorphosis Monday party at "Between Naps on the Porch" click on over there to see more great Before-and-Afters!

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