The kitchen - The most central room of the house

by: Adam Fennelly

The kitchen is fast becoming the most central room of the house, as a focal point, it is important for the kitchen to look clean and spacious. A sparkling new kitchen can make a real difference to your home and lifestyle.

If you’re planning to sell your property, a new kitchen or the renovation of the old one can add a real value to the house and be a key selling point to any potential buyer. Research carried out by Halifax ranked a new kitchen to be amongst one of the best ways of adding value to a house.

If a quick renovation is your objective to update the kitchen or to improve your selling potential, finding a company that can offer a budget range can be an economic solution to give your home a fresher look and feel at a low cost. By Replacing old doors, units, tiles, work surfaces or appliances can transform an old kitchen into the central hub of any house.

Essentially this requires replacing the doors, drawer fronts, cabinet handles and possibly the worktops (depending on how worn they look). If you have solid wood doors a common method and probably the cheapest method would be to paint all of the cabinet surfaces, door fronts and drawer fronts. This doesn't have to be a time consuming process either, this can usually be accomplished in just a couple of days maximum if done correctly (depending on how large the kitchen is). It does make a bit of a mess so it's advised that you do all the door and drawer painting outside or in a well-ventilated area of your home. For the cabinet body fronts you can paint them where they stand so putting up some plastic sheeting over the doorways to prevent excess paint and fumes from leaking into other rooms of your house would be a good idea.

Probably he other most popular method would be to simply have a all of the doors, drawers and hardware replaced while leaving the cabinet carcasses in place and either painting or refinishing those individually. Going down this road and choosing this method allows you the fun and freedom of shopping for new cabinet doors but also saving money over the price of entirely new cabinets!

Cabinet refacing also allows you to get a little more creative when choosing new and different colours and styles. Those more crafty individuals will often cut out the middle section of cabinet doors and replace them with all sorts of different materials such as punched copper, shiny objects between panes of glass, or even dried food materials in colorful arrangements. Simply using glass insets will provide a more open space visually, but be sure you're on the neat side as visitors will see the entire contents of your cabinets.

Before starting your cabinet refacing project make sure you check out various kitchen remodeling photos on the internet and in your local home improvement stores. They will have hundreds of great ideas to suit any budget.