Kitchens can be one of the most expensive rooms in a home! I feel like I could have easily spent our entire home budget in this one room!! But we managed to stay within our $10,000 Budget, and I didn’t have to compromise anything I wanted! It just took a little more time, work, and research to make it work! Here is what we did to save where we could!

One thing we did to save money was make our own hutches and cabinets! We bought a few unfinished cabinet singles from Lowe’s and built the island around those with MDF wood. I drew the hutches I wanted and my husband just went for it and made them out of the same wood! I used the cheap $5 mirrors from Walmart, pulled the frame off and used those for the mirrors! And of course just added a little trim to dress it up! He even made the rage hood cover out of the MDF wood! You would be so surprised what your capable of if you just give it a try!

One thing I wanted SO bad was a paneled fridge!! Wow they are crazy expensive!! Especially for a custom one. So I asked my sweet husband if he could just cover a normal one for me, and he told me he would give it a try! And it went SO well!! We bought 2 of the cheapest single fridges we could find, my husband switched the door swing of one of them to create a double door effect, and pushed them together. He then covered them with the MDF wood from Lowe’s and built the shelf above it and a little shelf under them to lift them up for a more “furniture” look! I also love the toe kicks he added around the kitchen! Such a simple thing can add so much charm!

An old fashioned range was something I really didn’t want to compromise with, I feel going with anything else would ruin the vision I had for the space. When I looked into them they were more then our whole kitchen budget!! Just for the range alone!! Then I found a newer brand called Hallman and surprisingly their prices were very doable! We really thought they were too good to be true! (This is not sponsored!) So my dreams of having my old fashioned range came true!! It was the biggest chunk of our budget, but because we did a lot of the other things ourself, we were able to splurge! It was a little bit of a wait to get it here, but well worth it!!

We really tired to do everything ourselves, the only thing we hired out in our kitchen was the counter tops. When hiring out always make sure to do your research and get a lot of bids! You can also check out my blog post about saving money while building here. Doing things yourself saves so much money and gives you more of that “splurge” money where you don’t want to compromise!