Let’s say you own a 2 bedroom house, and one of your tenants has just moved out, quite unexpectedly, and to your dismay, you learned that the kitchen in your old apartment looks as if a bunch of elephants have been living there.

You may think that these things do not happen, but this is exactly what happened to me. When my tenants moved out, they left a kitchen in a complete disarray. Flooring tiles were cracked in many places, and had deep cuts in them. Many wall tiles were missing.

Laminated surface kitchen countertop looked like it was used as a cutting board. Old iron-cast kitchen sink looked horrible, and the old paint was peeling of the metal cabinets in the kitchen.

Clearly, it was the time to renovate the old kitchen, if I were to have any reasonable hopes of ever being able to rent out this apartment.

So, I had a remodeling company come and give me an estimate that would take two years of rental for me to pay for. As it is the case with many homeowners, my remodeling budget was tight, and I was forced to find a more creative solution to remodel my old kitchen with tight budget in mind.

I ripped off the old laminate countertop and replaced with another laminate countertop from Lowe’s, which bought for $75.00.

It took me a few hours to round up the corners of the countertop in order to allow the kitchen door to open, as well as match the look of older countertop.

It took me a whole day to cut in, and fit in the stainless sink, which cost about $100.00, and to secure the top to the old metal frame.

The cabinets in the kitchen were made out of metal, and I decided to repaint them using a cabinet restoration kit, which I picked up from Lowe’s for $79.00. Following the enclosed DVD, and Instruction manual, my friend and cleaned up, and applied the cabinet restoration coating, which not only made the metal cabinets look great, but it actually made them look like real wood!

I had also purchased a new dish washer, and a new electric stove range. I did the installation and wiring of the old dishwasher myself, while the electric kitchen stove was delivered and installed by Lowe’s. I paid about $800.00 for both.

I hired a professional interior painter to paint over the old kitchen wall tiles. Notably these old tiles were made of plastic, and a few of them were missing. They do not make them anymore. So my interior painting and wallpaper guys detached a few tiles from behind the refrigerator, and adhered them to where a few tiles were missing.

They used a special paint in combination with primer in order to have paint adhere over the plastic tiles. They also painted the made-of-plastic old ceiling panels, which need a new touch in order to look well with newly painted kitchen walls.

The bottom half of the wall was painted in a slightly darker color, while the upper part of the wall was pretty bright white color suggested by the painter, in order to contrast with the dark wood-color cabinets, and kitchen window and door trim.

The final step, will be removing the old floor tiles, and installing a premium linoleum from Andersen Flooring. I will be posting pictures of this kitchen remodel on a budget soon.