Budget Friendly Classic White Kitchen Remodel- before pictures and our inspiration

Get the details about our budget friendly classic white kitchen remodel, including before pictures, our inspiration and where we got cabinets, flooring and backsplash for great prices!

Thank you Floor & Decor and TheRTAStore.com for sponsoring this post.  All opinions are totally my own.
There are affiliate links in this post – please read my full disclosure policy.

So, as you all know, we recently relocated and in the process ended up buying another fixer-upper.  Our new house is about 100 years old and has gorgeous details, a great floor plan and “good bones”.  But it needed quite a bit of work to freshen it up and get it looking great again!

We had big ideas that we could get all the work done before we moved in, but if you’ve done a remodel project, you know that it always takes way longer than you think.  And that’s exactly what happened for us.

We moved in about 7 weeks ago and still have painting and a few other small details to do before we are finished with the interior…and then there’s all the decorating to do, too!

We’re currently finishing up the painting in the kitchen, which put me in the mood to share a little about our budget-friendly classic white kitchen remodel with you all.

THE BEFORE

When we were looking at houses to buy, one of the criteria was that it had to have a nice, functional kitchen with a decent amount of workspace. Because, you all, the kitchen is one of my happy places.

Most days, I enjoy cooking and if I’m feeling stressed, it’s actually relaxing to me to go bake something.  Plus, we eat three homemade meals a day most days and the majority of that food is made from scratch, so I’m in my kitchen kind of a lot.

As a result, it was super important to me to have a space where I could enjoy making food and have fun creating new recipes to share with you all here on the blog.

And while we loved pretty much everything about this house when we first looked at it, the kitchen really made me pause and was enough of a concern that I almost persuaded my husband not to buy it!

Here’s what it looked like:

The “work” side of the kitchen.

The other side of the kitchen- this shot was taken standing at the sink.

As you can see, there wasn’t much cupboard space, no good area to use for food prep, unless you never have any dirty dishes (as if that’s real life), poorly lit (you mean you don’t like the drop ceilings with one big fluorescent light?!) and even though you can’t see it that well in the pictures, the cabinets were in pretty bad shape too (bad enough that they weren’t even worth trying to sell when we tore them out!).

I knew there was the possibility of remodeling this space, but I also knew the layout would make it tricky.  And hello, kitchens cost a lot of money to remodel!  Am I right?!

In the end, after lots of debating and researching the cost of renovating kitchens, my husband got me convinced that we could create a decent kitchen in this space and still not blow our budget.  

So we bought the house and got busy working to make this kitchen a functional, easy-to-work-in space!

THE INSPIRATION

I’d been perusing ideas on Pinterest for months and knew I wanted a mostly white kitchen.  I love how clean, bright and fresh that looks!

I also wanted to keep it fairly classic, both because that tends to be my style and also because we may end up reselling this house a few years down the road, and of course, classic is always good for resell value!

Here’s a little inspiration board that I came up with to kind of help me stay on track with the classic white kitchen look I was going for!

To keep things from looking too stark, I wanted to incorporate some wood elements for warmth and some stainless steel for interest, and again, to get that clean, classic look.

I also love the life that plants bring to pretty much any space, so I really wanted to include a few of them in my decor.  Basically, my goal was to go for a fairly simple look, with just enough detail to add some interest.

Once I had all of this decided, it was time to figure out where to get the supplies that we needed!

THE MAIN SOURCES

Here’s a friendly warning.  Do not do a full kitchen remodel if you don’t like making decisions.  Seriously, just don’t.

I knew from the beginning that there would be a lot of things to make decisions about, but whew, it still kind of caught me off guard and overwhelmed me at times!

For me though, the decisions that felt the biggest were related to what kind of backsplash and flooring to go with, as well as where to buy our kitchen cabinets.

Flooring & Backsplash

I had heard good things from acquaintances about Floor & Decor, so I checked and sure enough, they had a location in Devon, Pa. which is fairly close to our new house!

So one Saturday, we packed up the kids and headed out to see what we could find there as far as tile for backsplash, as well as possible flooring options.

And you all, even though I was expecting this place to be impressive because of what I had heard from other people, my husband and I were still wowed and surprised when we actually visited the store!  

In fact, the amount of product was almost overwhelming…but it was a good kind of overwhelming if that makes sense.  🙂

Basically, Floor & Decor sells any hard materials for flooring or walls.  For flooring, they have laminate, vinyl, bamboo, water-resistant wood, engineered and hardwood as well as a big variety of tile.

For the kitchen or bathroom, you’ll find marble, granite, stone, wood countertops, decorative tile, porcelain, ceramic and clay tile.

Two of the things that make Floor & Decor worth the trip in my opinion are their huge selection of top-quality tile, wood and stone products at great prices, as well as their excellent customer service.  The employees were all super friendly and helpful and made our shopping experience so pleasant.

I also love that almost everything is stocked so you can get it right away– no need to make another trip back to get large orders!  But if it works better for you, they also offer free storage of your order at the store for up to 2 weeks.

Plus, they also have samples of their product that you can purchase and if you return them within 30 days you’ll get your money back.  This is perfect for indecisive people like me who prefer seeing the product in their homes before committing to it.

I definitely was very grateful for this option when it came time to decide which kitchen flooring to go with!

We were on a time crunch, otherwise, I totally would have taken advantage of Floor & Decor’s free design services.  Each of their stores is staffed with designers who will work one-on-one with you to help you figure out how to get the look you want!

I was bummed that it didn’t work for us to do this, because, hello!  We could have gotten expert advice and opinions for free!  

We were so impressed with Floor & Decor that we ended up partnering with them for our kitchen remodel and they provided us with the beautiful glass tile that we used for our backsplash.  

We also decided to purchase our flooring there and went with a great water-resistant, wood-look laminate.  I can’t wait to show it to you all soon when I do my kitchen reveal post here on my site!

Update: The Budget Kitchen Remodel reveal post is now published here!

Cabinets

As much as I would have loved to go with totally custom cabinets for our kitchen, we simply didn’t have the budget for that.  And even if we did, since we aren’t sure how long we are going to be in this home, it wouldn’t have been the wisest decision anyway!

After looking into various options, we ended up getting ready to assemble Shaker-style cabinets from TheRTAStore.com.

Some friends of ours had recently bought kitchen cabinets from TheRTAStore.com and highly recommended them because of their great experience and the decent prices.

One of my favorite things about working with TheRTAStore.com is that they offer free design consultations.

When we were looking at places to buy cabinets, at one point we considered using Ikea.  The thing was, with Ikea we would have had to add their software to our computer and then design our own kitchen.

That not only looked a bit daunting since I have no experience, but it also looked awfully time-consuming too!

We loved working with Rachel, our designer at TheRTAStore.com.  She walked us through the entire process of designing our cabinets.  

She told us what measurements she needed, we gave her an idea of what we were wanting, she gave us suggestions to improve things or change things up, she was patient with us as we tweaked things multiple times and asked her to try different things to see how they would look.

And in the end, we came up with a layout and design that was what we were looking for and we didn’t have to spend hours trying to figure it out ourselves!

I thought it was really neat how the computerized kitchen layout renderings that Rachel did for us looked so real!  In addition to the overhead sketch that you see above, she also provided the multi-dimensional images that you see below.

I’m someone that has a hard time visualizing things, so these made it so much easier for me to figure out if the choices we were making were actually going to give me the look that I was wanting!

As you can see, we played around with different layouts and these visuals helped me get more of an idea of what would work best.

Because we didn’t want to deal with moving the window or doorways and because the kitchen was fairly small, it was a little tricky to come up with a layout and design that would flow well and be fun to work in.

Ultimately, we were very happy with the overall design.  And all those overwhelming decisions and hours spent figuring out how to make this space work were worth it!

I can’t wait to show you all the remodel “after” pictures of our classic white kitchen along with all the details soon.

In the meantime, if you are doing a kitchen, bathroom or laundry remodel and need cabinets…
TheRTAStore.com was kind enough to offer my readers 10% off their orders– just use promo code “take 10” at checkout!

Want to see the final remodel?  Click the image below for after pictures and all the details!