Our kitchen remodel is off to a great start. We spent all day yesterday gathering supplies, in true Frugal Babe fashion. We bought a stove on Friday night that we found on Craig’s List for $175. It was in a town about midway between my parents and us, so they met us at the lady’s house yesterday morning with their wagon so that we could haul it home. We brought it home and moved it into its new spot, which seemed like more fun than leaving it in the garage for the next month. We took the old one out to the curb and put an ad on Craig’s List saying that we had a free stove. Someone came and took it today, so now we don’t have to haul it anywhere, which is a bonus. And we have our new stove and dishwasher for a total of $275.
After we installed the stove, we stopped by our two local thrift stores to see if they had anything we needed. We ended up with a beautiful wooden door for our kitchen pantry (currently a lovely plastic wood-looking material from the mid 80s) for $10. We also got a corner cabinet with a lazy susan that almost exactly matches our current cabinets for $15 (I looked later at HD, and similar cabinets were $212). The one we got needs a little bit of work, but it will end up being perfect in the corner of our current dining room that is being converted to kitchen. And to round out the thrift store shopping, we found a pot rack for $15. It’s still in the original box, and will be perfect hanging from the ceiling in our new, bigger kitchen. Just those three things would have cost us about $400 new, and we spent a total of $40 on them. So a very good start.
At Home Depot, we bought just about everything we need for the kitchen, as well as enough click-together laminate wood flooring to do all three bedrooms in our house, and new wooden doors and nice door handles to replace the fake-wood doors in our upstairs. After the 10% discount that we got for opening a credit card at the store, our total bill came to $2086. We have 12 months to pay it off with no interest. We could have paid for the whole order without opening a credit card, but we wouldn’t have qualified for the $200 discount, which seems like a significant amount to us.
The counters ended up being much less expensive than we had originally budgeted, which is why we were able to afford the flooring and doors in addition to the kitchen stuff. We had been looking at laminate counters that had to be custom ordered, but my mother mentioned that the counters are available straight off the store shelves if you’re willing to choose from just a few colors that they have in stock. We found a color that we actually liked even better than the one we had settled on in the $15/sq foot options. And it was about $6/sq foot. Exact same brand name, but dramatically less expensive, and we love the color we chose.
Today we bought a stainless steel kitchen sink that we found on Craig’s List. We paid $30 for it. The only thing we still need is a new microwave/range hood, which I see on Craig’s List all the time, so I’m sure we’ll find one we like.
All together, we’ve spent $2400 so far, and about $750 of that is for doors and flooring for our upstairs rooms. So we’re still well under $2000 for the kitchen, and we have bought just about everything we need. We’re so excited to see this project come together, and to know that we’re staying well within our financial means to do it.
