ULTIMATE KITCHEN ORGANIZATION | Satisfying Clean and Kitchen Restock Organizing on A Budget

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel and welcome back to another room makeover. This one is probably my favorite. For a long time, my bedroom makeover was my top video, but I think this video takes the cake. In this video, we are completely redoing this living room. It looks nothing like it did before, even though we only brought in one new furniture piece. We kept everything else the same, DIYed what we could, and kept everything on a budget, just how I like to do things. So I hope you guys are ready for this video because I have been making this video for the last month. Here are the before shots of the living room. A lot of things were dark wood tones, black, and very, very warm. And this worked in our last place, but here we have really warm floors, our walls are a warm white, and it was just a little too much warm. So we're gonna cool things down a bit, bring in some more white, and first thing we're actually doing is getting rid of these couches. These couches served us well, but I started to realize there was just too much furniture going on in this room. So the first thing that went was that loveseat. We sold it online and got a little extra spending cash to put back into this space, and I'm also gonna be relocating Bucky's crate. You can see here tons of dog hair was hiding behind it, and I just didn't love that it was in our living space or a space that I wanted to be really light and open and airy. It's just super bulky, but still necessary, so I found a new home for it and freed up tons of space. Now I'm just going through and vacuuming all of the dirty little corners that were hiding in this living room that I have not been able to get to because we did have so much furniture in it before, and even just that minor change of taking out the dog crate and the loveseat, you can tell makes such a difference. Now the big couch ended up not selling for a while. It sat in our dining room for quite some time, but eventually Christian found a buddy from his job who was looking for a free couch, so we sent it off with them, and we were able to bring in our new couch from Living Spaces. Now don't click out of this video if you're here just for DIY things. This is actually the only new thing we bought for this room. Everything else we're gonna DIY on a budget, but we were in need of a new couch, and this is actually a great deal on a couch. I think it was less than $700. It's probably out of stock right now, but I still will link it and anything else I use in this video down below in the description bar, so if you're looking for anything that I share in this video, that's where you can find that. If for some reason something is not there, you can always leave a comment or DM me on Instagram, and I will go hunting for that for you. And since I already mentioned my Instagram, I always show behind-the-scenes sneak peeks of these videos in the making over on my Instagram, so everyone who is following me there saw all of these things happening in real time. I'm pretty sure this couch got delivered the first weekend in April, and then since then, we've been working on this living room. So if you wanna see sneak peeks on videos, get some more real-life stuff happening, and of course, pictures of our dog Bucky, head over to my Instagram and follow me there. And while you're supporting my channel, I would love it if you guys gave this video a like and went down to the comments and said hi. Those two things tell YouTube that you really love these videos and helps push it out to new people. That helps my channel grow. It helps me continue doing YouTube and turn this into a livable income for our family, which is awesome. So if you could support me in that way, I would love you dearly, and if you can't, that's okay. I hope you still enjoy this video. Now that we've freed up a ton of space in this room, you can see how much more light is coming into the room, and I'm gonna start playing around with furniture arrangements. I'm really bad at just visualizing and picturing something in my head. I love to see it in person or a mock-up on Photoshop, so here I'm gonna actually just be moving furniture around a bit, moving our TV, the bookshelves, and the couches around to see what really looks best. This is the layout I landed on this day, but stay tuned to the end because I end up changing one thing in here. But enough rearranging furniture, let's start DIYing. The first project I'm tackling is painting this TV stand white. The big thing I wanted to do in this room is brighten it up, get rid of so many dark colors, and just make the space feel light and airy. And yes, they do sell this TV stand in the color white. I kind of wish we bought it in white, but we didn't, so I'm working with what we got, and I am painting it still in this room. So I'm gonna lay down a drop cloth to protect our flooring and to make this a really easy job, and then I'm also going to lay out all of these shelves in the drawers, and so everything is easy to get prepped for painting. With these jobs, making the prep work really nicely makes the painting so much easier, so I spend way more time prepping all my stuff than I do actually painting it. So that's a big tip for you guys. Spend more time on the preparations. Don't just kind of rush into the painting because if you skip some of these steps, like wiping everything down or sanding some pieces of furniture if the paint type calls for it, you won't have as great as a finished product. But here I am taking out all of the drawer pulls, wiping everything down, making sure it's nice and clean, and since I am using chalk paint on this project, I'm not that concerned about sanding it. I'm leaving it as is, and it's gonna turn out great. I'm using the Rust-Oleum chalk paint in the color linen white. It's just the base color. You can pick this up off the shelves at Lowe's or Home Depot, and Amazon even sells this, and I'm using one of my favorite chalk paint brushes, which is this round brush. This makes putting on the furniture wax once you finish painting really easy. We'll get to that a little bit later, but I love this brush a lot, and I picked this one up from Amazon also. Now, I had already used this paint can, so it was almost empty by the time I finished my first coat on everything, so I am gonna end up grabbing a second can of chalk paint, so I'll give you those details when we get there. Now, if you're using chalk paint, do your best to have your surface prepped, clean, and dry before you start painting, and I like to get in all of the corners or the grooves or the hard-to-reach spaces first, and then I will go over every other area on a surface and make sure my paint strokes are all going the same direction. Chalk paint will dry with a little bit of a texture, especially if you're using a brush like this, so you're gonna wanna make sure that you have a seamless look if you have your brush strokes going the same directions. Since I had finished the can of Rust-Oleum chalk paint, I went to Lowe's and didn't realize different brands were sold at different stores, and I think Lowe's only sells the Krylon chalk paint finish. They might also sell Behr, I'm not quite sure, but just know that some of them are different at different places, but I did pick up just the stock white color and painted that on top and didn't notice any difference in the color or paint quality. They were the same price, so pretty much the same exact can of paint, and so I'm gonna use this paint to be doing the second and third coats. Yes, three coats of paint is a lot, but when you're painting black furniture like this, it's just necessary. To protect this piece of furniture, I got out some furniture wax. My favorite is the Behr Hard Furniture Wax. It's a very, very hard consistency, and you have to really work it in, but I find that you only need to do one coat of this to have a soft, smooth finish, whereas the Krylon Soft Wax took a lot more work, but whichever wax you choose, you will be buffing it in and buffing it out, but once that was done and dry, it was time to add the new hardware. I picked these knobs up from Lowe's. I'm not sure if they have these linked online. If I can find them, I'll share them down below for you guys, but I really loved this aged champagne brass color with an interesting knob. It was definitely an upgrade from these standard Ikea ones, so I'm gonna install these on all of the drawers, and then we're going to put it back together, and here is my first mistake of the video. I forgot that when you paint furniture like this, it takes two to three weeks for the paint to fully cure and harden and be kind of scratch-resistant. You still shouldn't try to scratch your furniture with furniture paint on it, but I was putting these shelves in and just destroying the paint job on the inside of this. Don't worry, we'll go in with some touch-up paint later, but it's just a good reminder that when you have freshly painted furniture, it needs more than just like the 24 hours it takes to dry to the touch. It really needs two to three weeks to fully cure and harden and be durable. We have one more painting project in this video, and that is painting this coffee table. You guys have been very vocal in the comment section that it is too big for the space, too bulky, not the right coffee table, but I really, really love this coffee table. I am overly attached to it. It was a hand-me-down, and it was passed along to other people, and it's just special to me. So I definitely wanted to give this coffee table new life and make it work in this space, and also cut down on the cost of buying a new coffee table. This is pretty much gonna be the same exact process as painting the TV stand. We're gonna empty everything out, prep the surfaces, paint it, seal it, and then put on the hardware again. So I won't be talking too much through this, but I really love this transformation. I really think we gave this coffee table a brand-new life. ♪ Here a million times so I know my way around ♪ ♪ Don't stop looking at me now ♪ ♪ I know you as much as I do ♪ ♪ I'm just content with me next to you ♪ Not only was I gonna be using brand-new hardware, but I also was gonna be repositioning the holes the hardware was sitting in. So we're getting our handy wood filler out and filling in all of the old holes where the previous hardware was. I didn't find any hardware that I liked that were these exact dimensions, so this was the best solution I had. ♪ Thank you for coming to make me smile ♪ ♪ I'll have a cup of tea while you have a latte for both you and me ♪ This table is pretty beat up, so I am gonna sand and then wipe down this surface just to give it the best shot for the chalk paint. For newer furniture like that IKEA TV stand, it's not necessary, but older pieces like this that have some ridges, some dents, and some peeling top coat definitely could use the extra help. I'm also gonna make sure I wipe everything down with a damp rag before I paint it. I'm gonna let it dry completely, and then we are painting this with a third brand of chalk paint. This is the Behr chalk paint in the color Graceful Gray. I went with this brand and this color because honestly, you could order it online. So I ordered this online from Home Depot and had it delivered to our house within a couple of days, which for me was the ideal situation. So I'm gonna go through it just like the TV stand and give this three good coats of paint, first starting on all of the grooves and edges and making sure I am painting with the grain of wood all in the same direction. ♪ To make me smile ♪ ♪ Let's go to a museum, I'll turn it at the coffee shop ♪ ♪ No, you don't get it but there's no need to fret it ♪ Here is a look at the coffee table after one coat of paint, and I ended up doing three just to be safe. So here's a quick look of how much thicker and darker and more opaque it is just after a second coat, and then it was just perfect after three coats. Now to protect the top of this coffee table, we use this table a lot, and I want it to be durable. So I am using a polyurethane and a paint pad. And then we are going to pour the polyurethane sealant, basically like a nail polish top coat for furniture. I'm going to pour it into this pie dish and then use the paint pad to make really smooth, slow, even strokes. You see me pausing a lot to pull little bucky hairs out of the table. You don't want to be leaving behind any dog hair or anything like that because it will forever be a part of your table, but I'm going to go through with just one coat of that to finish off the top of this table to protect it, and then I'll use furniture wax to protect the rest of the coffee table that isn't used as much. Because there's so many little ridges on this, I am using the Krylon soft wax and painting it on and then grabbing a rag to buff it all out. Here are the three styles of pulls we're going to end up using on the coffee table, and a little sneak peek right now, the new rug that is coming in a little bit later is here. The hardware actually got lost in the mail for a couple weeks, so this is one of the last things I did to the living room, so everything's actually already done at this point in time. But with YouTube magic, I can put all of the coffee table clips together here. But I'm adding just these small drawer pulls for the cabinets, and then I'm going to be adding the larger pulls on all the drawers. You dear, sweet delectable you, here, you got me tinglin' like, where Paris will ride. And right here is mistake number two of this project, all of the drawer pulls had just one single hole to drill, and so I drilled the single hole on the bottom drawer, completely forgetting that I had a two-prong pull, if that makes sense. So to this day, I still have a random hole sitting in the middle of this drawer, I'll go back eventually and fill it with wood filler and paint it, but for now, we're going to just live like that. But it's not that noticeable, and here's the final product of the coffee table. Make sure you stay tuned to the end of the video, when I'll do before and after shots for some really crazy transformations. But now back to the main living room, it's time to switch out this older rug. I got this rug off of Amazon really, really cheap, it was a great deal, but it's only six by nine, and I wanted an eight by ten rug in here, especially because we took out so much furniture, the room felt a lot bigger, so I wanted more rug space. So I am vacuuming this up, rolling it up, and taking it upstairs before I bring in the new rug. I probably spent the most time studying on Amazon every rug available, well not just Amazon, on Wayfair, on Macy's, every furniture website I was looking at rugs, and just could not make up my mind on what I wanted, and what would be affordable. So this rug is not the most expensive rug out there, it's not the cheapest option, but I am so happy with it, and yes it is white, I know it's not ideal for a lot of people's situations, especially us with a dog, and you do notice some little footprints or some little marks, but it cleans pretty easy, vacuums really well, and I just love how large and white it is, it just breaks up this room and does exactly what I want it to do, which is just to make this brighter and lighter and airier. The next upgrade in this room is to mount our TV. This was originally not part of the plan, but I got a crazy idea that you'll learn about in a few minutes, but step one of that crazy idea was mounting this TV. So here I am unboxing this, we ended up with a swivel mount because our windows face the TV directly, and it just helps with the glare if we can tilt it, so it's not going to be a flush mount or anything, but it does pull out really far, and it's really flexible. We also have this TV mount out in our garage on a much heavier TV, and I can attest to it being super heavy duty and great quality, also another affordable Amazon find. I would like to think that I'm a pretty independent, pretty competent individual and can do a lot of this stuff myself, but behind the scenes for most of these projects, you guys don't see how hard my husband Christian works, he really makes all of this possible, including hanging this TV mount. I was not strong enough to hold it up, and he was able to get it up lickety split, like behind the scenes, this man is doing it all, and you'll see that especially later on in some of the DIYs, but here's a little cameo of him. He normally doesn't like to be on camera, but he was gracious enough to let me film him actually hanging the TV, because I think it turned out awesome. Now I'm going to be doing a little bit of decorating. I had been filming this video for the entire month, and I like to save decorating till the very, very end when all the DIYs are done, all of the painting's done, all the furniture pieces are in, but I just couldn't wait any longer. So I'm taking out this bookshelf, I'm also putting down this basket from Walmart, and this tray on our coffee table from Target, and I'm going to add a candle, some coasters, a plant, just style it up a little bit. I had been living with a kind of half done room for like three or four weeks at this point, and was just itching to decorate it. So thanks for bearing with me, for living with the decorating in the middle of the video, even though I do like to save it towards the end, and you probably already picked up, there is a little bit of a DIY hint happening on that back wall. But a couple more decor pieces came in. This giant tree I found online, I have been seeing in all the Instagram bloggers homes, they all have this same fake olive tree, and it was on Amazon for $180. Absolutely bonkers. So I was stalking those Instagram homes that I loved, and somebody shared that on a website, I'll have it linked below the exact one, but they sell it for $130, and they offer a $25 discount. So I think it's an affiliate, like I can refer a friend and they get $25 off, so I'll link that down below if you're interested, but I love that tree so much, and it was a complete steal compared to how much it normally retails for. Time to DIY some picture frames. So I had a very specific image in my head that I wanted large square picture frames, and I found them for sale at Pottery Barn for $115 for one frame, and I wanted three. So that was going to be a no on the budget, so I figured out with Christian's help how to DIY them myself. I ordered this $15 corner clamp off of Amazon, we used some wood glue, and the wood we actually used to make the frame was scrap wood we already had from building our dining table, so I'll link all of these supplies down below and also an article or two about how to make this yourself, but I will admit Christian did most of the legwork on this. He cut this little notch into each piece of the wood using his table saw so we could rest a photo inside of there, and then he cut 45 degree angles on all the sides to make them all square up. He did all the work on this, I just glued all the pieces together and then put the pictures in it, but this was a very, very easy DIY that saved us probably the most money on this entire project. I think it was $12 for all three photos and frames, whereas the Pottery Barn frames alone were $345 before taxes. That's going to be a no from me. If you are looking for affordable frames, I do love Ikea, but they just didn't have the specific shape and size I was looking for. Now, for the back of a photo frame, instead of buying fancy matting paper and a paper matting tool to get that crisp white background, I went to Walmart and bought poster board. From your school days when you used to do little presentations and have poster boards, I bought three of them, and they were less than 90 cents each, and then I just measured out the size of each frame, trimmed them down to size with a box cutter, and that's going to be the back of my photo for a clean white finish, and it's also sturdy enough to kind of hold the whole frame together. We did think about doing a piece of glass in front, but honestly, I don't think it's very necessary. I made sure the prints that I got printed at Walmart were on matte paper so they're not super shiny, and then I just used double-sided tape and a glue stick to attach these to the poster board, and then I placed them in the frame. They rested perfectly in those little ridges Christian had made, and then it's a super ghetto. But I just taped the backs up, and they worked great. This whole project was super easy, super affordable, very DIY friendly, and if you look a little too close, you can definitely tell it was DIY, but for saving over $300, definitely worth it to cut some corners on this project. This was the point of the video where I really wished that we had a laser level, but since we didn't, I was going to work with what I had, which is blue painter's tape. This is my secret weapon for hanging anything, so I put it up roughly where I wanted all of the picture frames to hang from, I grabbed our large level, made sure it was straight, it wasn't exactly perfect, but it was good enough, and then I put in three nails. I eyeballed this at first, I kind of just aimed for the center of each couch cushion. Once I had the second nail in though, I got smart, I grabbed a tape measure, and then made the third photo hang the exact distance the other direction, that way they look as symmetrical as possible. This room is really starting to come together, but we still have one more DIY left to do, and that is with the TV. So first we're going to be hiding these unsightly little cables. We are renting, so we can't run them through the walls, so I'm just zip tying them together and then using our touch-up paint that our housing provided, we're going to just paint them the same color of the wall to kind of disguise it as much as we can. It's not perfect, but it's better than it was before, but that's not the DIY. The DIY is turning our TV into a wannabe Samsung frame TV. I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen online these beautiful $2,000 TVs that have frames around them that look like they are just art on the wall, and they are beautiful. But $2,000 for a new TV was definitely not in the budget. But we did have room in the budget to go spend $15 at Lowe's to buy some more hardwood. I think this is poplar wood. And Christian cut these same exact grooves into it as he did for the picture frames, and we're going to just DIY the frame that goes with that fancy TV. So doing the same exact corner clamp and wood glue situation as we did with the picture frames, we're going to build a frame that fits the measurements of our TV. And then using black elastics, I'm going to staple gun these to the back of the frame. Since we do normally swivel this TV, we don't want the frame to slide off easily. And I figured the black elastics were the easiest way to keep it on there. I actually got this idea from the Sorry Girls here on YouTube. They showed a video doing this, and I took a little bit of inspiration from them. So we cut this down to size. It took a lot of trimming to get it the exact size of the TV. But once it was on, it was so worth it to be able to DIY the $2,000 Samsung frame TV for only $18. Now, it's not perfect. It's not a flush mount, but it works for us, and I love it so much. And that's the last DIY in this video. Are you ready to see some before and after shots? So much time and effort on both my part and Christian's part went into this room, and I think it truly shows. We love this space so much. Our new favorite spot in the house. And I doubt any other room can really top this space. And Bucky, of course, loves it too. I want to thank you all so much for watching. If you've watched this far and you haven't already liked this video, make sure you go down below and do that. And I will see you guys in the next one. Bye.