£100 for paint paid dividends
Carley Fowler, 32, lives in West Malling, Kent, with her husband Paul. She transformed her kitchen for less than £200. She reckons that helped add £25,000 to the value as demand for three-bedroom homes surged in lockdown. When my husband Paul and I moved into our home in May 2017, the decor was not our style. We’ve spent the past few years painting everything white and I’ve been sharing updates on Instagram under @allwhitehouse.
Everyone thinks I’m mad doing all the DIY as I’ve got 20-month-old twin girls, but it hasn’t stopped me. We thought lockdown was a great time to transform our kitchen to match the rest of the house.
It had really dark wooden worktops and cabinets so it felt dingy and small.
One day I popped to B&Q and spent £100 on white paint and another £100 on basics like white spirit, rollers, Polyfilla and dust sheets. Then we got to work. We started it at 8am and finished by 8am the following day. We removed everything from the cupboards, lightly sanded them down, then thoroughly cleaned all the cabinets with sugar soap spray and warm microfibre cloths to remove any grease or dirt. Once the surfaces were prepped we applied one coat of white kitchen cupboard paint to all the cabinets. We let it dry overnight, then applied a final coat the next morning. A new kitchen would have cost us £8000 to £10,000 so it was worth our effort. We’d had the house valued in February 2020 at £425,000, so I was curious to see how that would change when the kitchen was complete. I asked the same estate agent to come round a few weeks later and was gobsmacked when he told me the house was worth £25,000 more. It goes to show you that you do not need to spend loads to have a pretty home and it will help with our future house sale.