1 | Refinishing Kitchen and Bath Cabinets
If you still like the style of your kitchen or bathroom cabinets, one alternative for remodeling is to refinish the them instead. According to a local cabinet refinishing company, refinishing your cabinets can cost one-third of the price of installing all new cabinets or cost about the same as some economical cabinet lines. When you refinish your cabinets, they are stripped to bare wood and then painted with oil-based lacquer. Doors and drawer fronts are done at the company’s work site, but some refinishing is done in your home. Extensive prep work is done to protect all areas of the kitchen/bath and house during the work.
If you plan on keeping your countertops and like where all the appliances and/or plumbing fixtures are located, then you can get a whole new look just by refinishing the cabinets. This allows you to save about a 1/3 because you won’t be paying for the cost of demolition and all new cabinets.
If new counter tops are in the plan, or if you are relocating appliances and/or plumbing fixtures, you’re probably looking at all new cabinets as well. If you are going to go through all that upgrading, at that point, you might as well upgrade the cabinets also.
2 | Relining Your Bathtub
So what do you do about that old, banged-up bathtub when you can’t afford to rip it out and replace it? The best idea may be to cover it with a tub reliner; a durable and attractive solution that will cost about $2,000 to $3,000, which is less than a third of what it costs to completely replace a tub. Generally, a relining company in the Phoenix area sends measurements for your tub to a factory where an acrylic shell is made to fit on top of the old tub. After a few weeks, your finished liner is installed. The final process only takes a day, and you can use the tub almost immediately.
3 | Crown Moldings
Traditionally, crown molding for ceilings always used to be made of wood, but wood can be expensive and more complicated to install. If you’re doing the installation yourself, it can be a challenge. Getting the joints in the corners of the room to look right can be tough because each joint has compound angles; you might have to use a power miter saw to do the job. So with wood, a more expensive choice, you may want to hire a professional carpenter.
However, the latest choices in crown molding are plastics which can be a better, less costly alternative. Since the plastic moldings often hang high overhead, it’s hard for anyone to know that they’re not actually real wood. Plastic moldings are lightweight and easier to install, plus, they will not warp or disintegrate when exposed to moisture.
4 | Baseboards
If you’re remodeling an older home and the baseboards look beat-up, you may want to replace them. Maybe you’re not going to buy expensive high-end hardwood baseboards, but you still have choices to make. If you want to paint them, you can buy less-expensive pine or even cheaper Medium-Density Fiberboard also known as MDF. MDF is an engineered product made by breaking down wood scraps into fibers and then using heat and pressure to turn them into things like baseboards, and even crown moldings. MDF actually holds paint better than many wood species and once it’s painted, no one will know it’s MDF in the first place.
###
