Cream shaker cabinets, walnut butcher block, a sage picket backsplash, and a “criminal” framed pantry swapped for floor-to-ceiling storage — inside a remodel that came in under $40k without a single wall coming down.
The most repeated reaction in the thread wasn’t about the walnut counters everyone fell in love with, or the sage tile, or the cabinets that finally reach the ceiling. It was about a number.
“I just can’t believe that was 40k!!!” one commenter wrote. “Finally an affordable, completely doable remodel!” said another. A third: “One of the first kitchen renos I’ve seen that actually looks better in the after photos.” The disbelief comes up again and again, people doing the math, re-reading the breakdown, and landing somewhere between envy and relief that a full-kitchen transformation at this level didn’t require six figures.
The kitchen belongs to Reddit user u/jat2018, who posted the before-and-afters to r/kitchenremodel with a deceptively modest caption: “Waited 5 years to make the big change. Small adjustments in our layout have made a huge difference in functionality and perceived size.”
What makes the project worth studying isn’t a single showpiece. It’s the restraint. In a sub full of gut-jobs that bulldoze every wall and land north of $100k, this one quietly proves a different thesis that you can completely change how a kitchen feels without changing its bones, and do it for the price of a midsize SUV.
They Waited Five Years and Lived With the “Landlord Yellow” the Whole Time
To understand why the after lands so hard, you have to sit in the before for a minute.
Orange-toned oak cabinets that stopped well short of the ceiling. Pale blue laminate counters. A boxy fluorescent fixture throwing flat light over everything. And walls in a shade of builder beige that the owner came to resent with real specificity.
“The yellowish landlord paint was the bane of my existence. Made the whole house look like we were chain smoking year-round.”
That five-year wait turns out to be the project’s secret weapon. Living in the space that long meant the owner knew exactly where it failed, which is why, when the work finally happened, there was no guesswork. As she put it when someone asked whether she’d designed it herself:
“Having lived in the house for 5 years we knew exactly what was needed for the layout and I made all materials selections to my tastes. I’m a planner so I had full diagrams to scale pre-made for our contractors.”
The $40k Breakdown, in Her Own Words
When a commenter asked for the real numbers, the owner didn’t hedge. She laid the whole thing out:
“Came just under $40k. $32k to the contractor who re-floored with spc vinyl, trimmed, and painted all common areas (laundry, entryway, kitchen & dining, living room, and hall), widened the entry to dining, knocked out the partial wall and framed pantry, put in new lighting, and sourced all the materials. $6500 for the custom counters. $1k in incidentals.”
The cabinets, she added in an edit, are wholesale in a color called Trenton Swan White, with conversion kits added for the spice and trash pull-outs flanking the stove. The floors are SPC vinyl, not tile or hardwood. The headline figure covered far more than the kitchen, it included painting and re-flooring the entire common area of the home.
That context is exactly why the comment section short-circuited. People expect $40k to buy a kitchen. This bought a kitchen and a whole-floor refresh.
The Walnut Counters Are the Part Everyone Wanted to Touch
If the price was the hook, the counters were the swoon.
“The butcher block is gorgeous!” one commenter wrote. “I have always wanted it but I know myself enough to be certain I’d try to baby it and stress myself out.” The owner’s answer is the most useful thing in the whole thread for anyone considering walnut butcher block of their own:
“We ended up going with a local woodworker who hand selected the walnut, constructed the counter, and sealed with a catalyzed conversion varnish! From my research this finish should be far more durable than your run of the mill oil sealed counters. I had my heart set on wood counters so I had to find a way to make it work!”
It’s face-grain walnut, she clarified elsewhere, sourced from a local mill, with no stain, just the natural tone of the wood. And she paired it with a deliberately un-trendy hardware choice: oil-rubbed bronze instead of matte black.
“Oil rubbed bronze! We wanted a brown tone to pair with the counter and matte black felt a little too house-flipper.”
The “Criminal” Framed Pantry Was the Single Best Move
Ask the comment section what actually changed the kitchen, and a surprising number of people point to one thing: the closet that became a cabinet.
The original kitchen had a framed-in drywall pantry beside the fridge, the kind of boxed closet that looks like storage but quietly wastes the room around it. One commenter called it flatly: “The framed pantry was criminal.” Another: “Obsessed with the new pantry set up next to the fridge!! so much more practical than a drywalled closet.”
The owner’s reasoning is the kind of thing only someone who’d lived with the space for five years would notice:
“It was a framed pantry and not functional at all. We lost 8+ inches with the framed walls and the original shelves were only 12 inches deep. Felt a better use of limited floor space to go with a pantry cabinet.”
Swapping a stud-and-drywall closet for floor-to-ceiling cabinetry reclaimed the eight inches the framing ate, deepened the usable storage, and, because the new cabinets run to the ceiling, added capacity without expanding the footprint by a single inch.
Cabinets to the Ceiling, and Not One Wall Removed
The other detail commenters kept naming was the vertical reach of the new cabinetry.
“Cabinets to the ceiling!” one wrote, with applause. “Really makes a difference to take the cabinets to the ceiling. You made lots of good decisions,” said another. The original oak uppers left a dead gap of wall above them, prime real estate for dust and decorative clutter. The new cream shaker cabinets close that gap entirely.
But the move that most surprised people is what didn’t happen: no major demolition. As one commenter put it, “I can’t believe what a change you made to it without a huge layout change.” The owner agreed that staying modest was the point, and that one contractor’s suggestion to go bigger horrified her:
“When we were getting quotes a contractor suggested moving the stove where the sink was and bricking over the middle window. My husband and I looked at each other in pure revulsion.”
That window she fought to keep is part of a near-bay arrangement of three, a quirk of the layout she counts among her favorites.
The Partial Walls Came Down, and the Room Grew Without Getting Bigger
The one structural change that did happen was small and surgical: a partial dividing wall on the stove side came out, and the entry to the dining room was widened.
The effect, in the afters, is dramatically out of proportion to the effort. “It looks so much more open, you can literally feel the space even through photos,” one commenter wrote. “Crazy how just changing layout instead of knocking down walls can make it feel like a whole new place.” Another: “I can’t believe those little walls made it feel so closed in!”
Removing the wall beside the counter didn’t just open sightlines, it returned usable counter space the partition had been blocking. Several commenters singled this out as the change that made the kitchen feel like a different, larger room.
She’s Honest About What She’d Still Change
Part of why the thread reads as trustworthy rather than staged is that the owner doesn’t pretend it’s finished or flawless. The chandelier over the table is on its way out:
“New one is coming this weekend! Replacing the chandelier and bringing plants back are the final things before we are 100% done.”
She talked through the glass-front cabinets she went back and forth on, deciding the openness was worth it because the new layout gave her plenty of hidden storage to offset it. She addressed the lighting questions head-on, there’s a separate can light over the sink on its own switch, and the small kitchen gets bright enough that the overhead is plenty. And she’s still figuring out the coffee situation, leaning toward ditching the bulky drip machine for a French press.
Not every comment was a rave. A few preferred the original oak warmth, one missed the old tile, and a couple flagged the square tile accent behind the stove as a detail they’d have run all the way up. But the overwhelming consensus landed where one architect, a self-described “frequent hater on this sub”, put it:
“I am a luxury residential architect and frequent hater on this sub. You did such a good job. The reno looks amazing.”
The Takeaway: You Don’t Have to Gut It
The lesson buried in this remodel is the one the comment section keeps circling: transformation and demolition are not the same thing. The footprint barely moved. The walls, with one small exception, stayed put. The windows stayed. What changed was the quality of every surface and the intelligence of a few small decisions made by someone who’d lived in the space long enough to know exactly where it failed.
That’s also why it reads as a genuine alternative to the six-figure gut renovation. The owner didn’t out-spend the problem. She out-planned it, choosing a warm, cozy palette over cold and stark, reclaiming wasted inches, and trusting that a dim, yellow-lit room could become bright and open without being torn to the studs.
Or, as one commenter summed up the whole before-and-after in a single line:
“This is the first kitchen reno I’ve seen where the update was done well and actually improved.”
Project and photos by u/jat2018, shared via r/kitchenremodel on Reddit.
