The Kitchen: Budget Breakdown

Doing all the labor on our kitchen saved us a ton of money. Like thousands and thousands. I'm extremely grateful that my husband knows his way around power tools so that we didn't put ourselves into debt to re-do the kitchen. We are pretty frugal and obviously shopped around for the best deals we could find, while still getting the items that we wanted and not skimping on quality.

The bottom line dollar for the entire kitchen came to $4,993.33. The budget we set for ourselves before we started was $5,000 so I'm happy we came in under that - by 7 dollars! HA!! Here's an itemized list of the budget breakdown so you can see where that money went:

Flooring & Walls - $768.85 (this includes the tile, grout, thinset, backerboard, tiling tools, baseboards and all trim, spackle, paint, etc.)

Cabinets (stock white cabinets from Home Depot) - $1,551 (we lucked into buying the cabinets during Memorial Day weekend and they were having a 20% sale on all in-stock cabinets. We also opened a HD credit card the same day to get an additional 10%)

Cabinet Hardware, Knobs/Pulls and Screws - $134.54 (we ordered all the knobs off of Ebay for less than a dollar a piece, which was the best price we found anywhere)

Countertops - $1,862 (this includes the templating and installation through Home Depot)

Faucet - $197.00

New over-the-range microwave - $297 (again, we hit up a Memorial Day Sale at Sears for the microwave)

Lighting and Electrical - $249.94 (this includes the new overhead light, the pendant light over the sink (that hasn't been installed or blogged about yet), under cabinet puck lights (again, not installed or blogged yet) and random wiring parts.

Miscellaneous - $360 (this includes the beautiful shelf liner paper I NEEDED and the supplies for the fridge built in, shelving and desk that Jake built (which again hasn't been blogged about!)

So that's how we spent less than $5,000 on a brand new kitchen, from floor to ceiling. It was an extremely gratifying project and it made the months of eating off paper plates with plastic silverware all worth it. We cook SO MUCH more now and I'm baking up a storm as well. It makes me happy to walk into our house and see the kitchen. I told J we're never moving because I'm not ever leaving this kitchen!