Updating our Tiny Rental Kitchen On A Budget

We're renters and we have a small apartment. Like... a very small apartment. Our kitchen consists of four sets of cabinets, a sink, and a refrigerator. Also, in case you were wondering... this is the width of our entire apartment. We know we have to make the most of our place and want to leave it better than how we found it so we decided it was time to paint the kitchen!

Honestly, you really can't tell that these cabinets aren't white unless you put the before and after next to each other or watch us paint them but they were a light green almost mint color.

Greasy hair painting session.

Overall it really wasn't that expensive. It cost us about $50 total for the paint can (one) and brushes/rollers.

We painted directly on the cabinets instead of taking them off just because we could tell that's how they were painted before and getting a little paint around the edges wasn't a huge deal. If you're going to do this the right way, I highly suggest you take the cabinets off and paint them outside.

Before the paint:

After Paint:

We ended up getting a new kitchen island and sold our last one, organized our cabinets and made it look as good as we could. We tried moving our toaster oven (the only oven we have) but it came back to the counter shortly after this photo was taken.

In case you're curious, yes that is a hot plate in the window. We have deep enough windows to hold our hot plate which was really great for us because we wouldn't have anywhere else to put it. We also do have a microwave but it's in the bottom cabinet so you can't see it.


We also decided to get peel and stick backsplash from Amazon for about $25 and we ended up getting 2 packs of them which came out to be about $50.

Our entire spend was roughly $100 - not too shabby for a small kitchen makeover.

Before:

After: