Binkies and Briefcases

Before & After

A picture walk through our Craigslist Kitchen Progress thus far (keeping it real with preschool artwork on the fridge & clutter on the counter tops):

You can read about how we made the island here.

We still need the backsplash and some of the moldings (and eventually a new fridge) but we are this close to being DONE!!

I’m loving my new-to-me kitchen 🙂

Remember this u.g.l.y dresser?

(Ok, not this actual one, I stole this picture from ebay, but it’s the exact same dresser I bought from ReSource York, except mine didn’t come with the hutch.)

This was the best before picture I could get of our actual dresser in the awful light in our garage.

I wanted to turn it into a kitchen island like I saw Jonni do at House of Johns.

Eddie wanted to make it a little more elaborate so that it looked as much like a piece of kitchen cabinetry as possible.

That’s my handy man at work 🙂

He added bead board to the back and a little overhang/bar area (The top is two pine board panels from Lowes glued together with liquid nails and trimmed out with decorative molding, doing it that way was half the price of buying butcher block from Ikea plus we didn’t have to rip it down like we would have the Ikea top.) and I sanded and stained and primed and painted my little heart out and a month later we now have…

Still sitting in the garage waiting for the last few steps to be completed, but once we break out the drill for new holes for hardware in the top drawers (they are spaced differently than the lower drawers, bummer) and put a coat of polyurethane on top, she is done!!

The total came in around $300, which is more than I thought I would spend (and was due in large part to the fact that I splurged on really expensive hardware) but totally worth it.

Estimated costs break down:
dresser & delivery fee: $75
paint: $30 I bought a gallon because I’m going to use the rest for something else, you really only need a quart. You can get a quart of Oops paint for $2.50
beadboard: $20
decorative posts: $60 not really necessary, but I love them
Top:$70 You could cut that in half by just buying one panel, but I wanted the height so that island was the same height as the other kitchen counters.
Hardware: $65 again, not really necessary, I could have spray painted the old ones, but I splurged and I LOVE the new ones
Stain, sandpaper, nails, trim, caulk, primer: already on hand $0

Total: $315 (ish)

I’m SO excited to get it into the kitchen this weekend!!

Update: DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Click here to see it in the kitchen and see how we used Craigslist to remodel the whole room.

Tips if you want to try this yourself:
1. Try to find a dresser with a combination of wide and narrow drawers. The wide ones are great for things like baking sheets and table linens. The narrow ones are good for cookbooks and cooking utensils.
2. Check the height of your counters. I know that my counters hit me right at my hip bone so when I was out looking for dressers it was easy to tell if they were going to be a good counter top height even if I didn’t have a tape measure.
3. Paint. Don’t try to stain anything but the top because it is made of so many different kinds of materials by the time it all comes together paint is the best bet. 2 coats of primer and 3 or 4 coats of a semi-gloss. Maybe even a clear coat on top of that. (Don’t forget to sand first!)
4. If you can find a dresser with a door in it scoop it up! I really think this helps it look less like a dresser and more like a piece intended for a kitchen. That was the main reason I chose this piece. (plus it’s a great place to keep a mixer or a bread machine)

Let me know if you try it!

Isn’t she pretty? Guess what? She was FREE. Actually, I made $5 for upgrading. “How?” you might say. It’s all part of my Craigslist Kitchen Transformation. It might be taking forever, but I estimate that in the end I will have saved about $20,000. Maybe more!

It all started a year ago when we got a decent tax refund and I went to Lowes to get a quote for new cabinets. You see, our old kitchen looked like this:

When we first bought the house I was planning to live with this for a while. “A while” lasted all of about 6 months before I couldn’t take it anymore. The old cabinets were literally disintegrating, as in you would put your clean dishes away and before you could use them again you had to re-wash them because they were full of sawdust. There was also an uneven and ugly floor, fake bricks, and a giant burn mark on the white-with-gold-flecks laminate counter top.

Anyway, back to my story. Lowes wanted $12,000 for mid-grade cabinets. Um, no. Our tax refund wasn’t that big. But I had big dreams for this kitchen, I wanted it nice and I wanted it NOW. (The “now” part turned out to be negotiable.) I was NOT paying that much just for cabinets. I wanted to stay under 5 grand for the entire kitchen.

So I started scouring Craigslist and I found out about Re-source York, a local store that re-sells building materials at discount prices. I decided that we could go green and save big bucks at the same time by reusing someone else’s old cabinets.

I know God loves me because one day I happened to find an ad on Craigslist for an entire kitchen that had almost the same layout as ours. Solid cherry cabinets, solid surface counters, a porcelain sink, a stove, and a dishwasher. They wanted $2,500 dollars. SOLD! We rented a U-Haul and rounded up cousins & fraternity brothers and they helped us haul all of it up the sellers 100+ foot inclined driveway and across town into our garage where it sat until we could save up enough money to hire a contractor to install it. That was July 3rd, 2009.

In the meantime, their stove was electric and we have a gas hook-up, so I re-listed their stove on Craigslist and got $500 for it. Therefore my kitchen only cost $2,000.

In October we decided to sell some stock and hire a contractor because I was completely fed up with the old kitchen. Hubby is handy, but not quite handy enough to tackle a job this big. Lucky for us, our neighbor and his dad are contractors and they ripped up the old floor & installed the cabinets, counters, etc for $1,600.

This is when we learned that the counters are Silestone and go for anywhere between $45-$90 per foot. We have a BIG kitchen. Those counters would have easily cost the $2,000 we paid for the whole kitchen.

Plus, we saved even more money be re-using the old cabinets in the garage to store Eddie’s tools.

So now my total was up to $3,900 (counting the U-Haul and some new cabinet hardware) and I had my cabinets, counters, and sink. We decided to live without a floor and with our old appliances for a while. In the meantime we bought some paint and trim and a little beadboard for the soffet. That all cost about $150. At $4,050 I was getting dangerously close to my limit and I still need a floor, new pantry door, a stove, a back splash, and a fridge.

In April of this year we got another tax refund and used it to buy a vinyl floor. So far this was the only compromise I had to make. I REALLY wanted tile, but it just couldn’t be done without taking out and replacing the entire sub-floor. That was not in the budget and we were going to be in danger of over-improving for the area. Plus our kitchen & dining room area is huge, so just the tile itself was going to be expensive. As it was, the Allure vinyl cost us about $800.

That’s the original vinyl floor on the left, which was hiding under the red floor and is also glued directly to the sub-floor. It took us almost a month of working on the weekends, leveling the old floor, and enlisting the help of my father-in-law to get this thing laid down.

That put me at $4,850 and with our new pantry door $4,887. For the record, do not buy 2 panel doors at Lowes. The only one they had cost $120. Home Depot had the same thing for $37. Go to Home Depot for doors.

This was the old door.

This is the new one.

We’ve decided to do bead board in a cream color for a back splash, but it isn’t up yet. I think that’s going to put me right at my limit. But noooooo…I still needed a new stove & a fridge. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid going over budget on a fridge. It’s going to happen, but maybe not until next year’s tax refund comes around. However, I did manage to score a sweet stove for free this week.

When I saw an ad on Craigslist for a stainless steel gas stove for $75 my eyes just about popped right out of my head! We really didn’t have an extra $75 laying around at the time, but I told Eddie I was almost positive that if the new stove worked (that was a big “if”) I could sell our old stove for at least that much, if not more, which would make the new stove free.

So we bought the stainless steel stove and it does work. The old owner said one of the burners was broken, but Hubby gave it a good cleaning and read the manual that they were kind enough to give us. It turned out the child safety lock was on and everything works perfectly!

This morning I sold our old stove for $80. When the man came to pick it up I had my little brother lock himself in the house with the kids and I went out to meet the guy with some Mace and a knife in the waistband of my skirt as a precaution. That’s the first time I’ve sold something on Craigslist without Eddie home, but it went well. The man was very nice. (and I didn’t even have to assault him)

So far I have been ridiculously lucky with my Craigslist finds, but I do caution you to be careful if you try this yourself!

Last week marked a year since we began this kitchen remodel. We’ve still got a solid few months to go, but eventually it will be GORGEOUS! (and cheap, he he)