My husband and I moved to the Kentucky house over 7 years ago. The house, built in 1901, needed a lot of attention. I had done a cheat fix on the kitchen, but it felt drab. It needed some attention badly. The problem? Little money.

I identified the things in the kitchen that bothered me the most and decided to tackle them using material I had laying around the house.

Number one on my list: KITCHEN CHAIRS.

The kitchen set was given to me by a family friend. She died about 12 years ago at the age of 100 or so. She was old school. Never threw anything away; repaired and recycled before it was fashionable. These chairs were painted with an odd paint (Mac-o-lac? Enamel?) that felt sticky and looked dirty no matter how hard I scrubbed or what I used on them. The original owner wasn’t much on looks so painted the entire chair, including the seat cushions.

I liked the basic colour, but hated the finish and feel. I decide to do a rough sand on the entire chair. Rough sanding involves using coarse or medium grit sandpaper, and simply sanding with the grain. You can do this by hand, or with an electric sander (I love the Mouse by Black and Decker). Rough sanding removed the top finish, and in a lot of areas it also removed one or more layers of paint. Apparently, the chairs were painted a gold at some time because gold paint started to show through. Other areas, we removed the paint to expose the bare wood.

We finished the chairs by dusting them off and rubbing wax on them, then recovered the seats using burlap feed sacks I had stored in the shed. I am totally pleased with the result.

They look good, but more importantly, they feel great and cost nothing but a few hours of my time!

Next on the list: KITCHEN CABINETS.

I think these were installed in the early 60s…. the wood was sturdy enough, but…. well, they used that pine that was common and varnished them.

I decided the cabinets needed to ‘pop’. What better way then to paint them? I had left over off-white paint that would do the trick.

Next, add a surprise colour inside the cabinets. I had done this at the Michigan house with lime green and loved it. I would have loved to use orange or red in these cabinets, but at almost $30 a gallon, I opted to use paint I already had. Left over from a previous project, I had 3/4 of a gallon of bright sea blue.

The end result achieved the effect I was looking for. It is so much brighter and comfortable in the kitchen, and it was basically free and took little time or work.