In over 20 years of design and designing kitchens, here's something that still catches people off guard. How much you spend doesn't guarantee that your kitchen looks expensive and it can still come off looking cheap. You can spend 50 grand on a kitchen and still walk in and something's not quite right. And you can spend a fraction of that and your kitchen looks like it could be in a magazine. The price tag's not necessarily what decides it. Welcome to Design Your Home, the podcast that helps you design and decorate your home with confidence. I'm Sally Sorcelli, award-winning interior designer. Let's get started.
Well, hey there, and welcome back to another episode of Design Your Home. Quick heads up before we dive in. This is the last kitchen episode before tomorrow's free training that I'm hosting, where I'm redesigning a real kitchen submitted by someone on this list. More on that in a bit, but first, let's get into this episode. I've got three signs your kitchen might be reading as cheap, no matter what you spent on it, plus a bonus sign at the end that almost no one thinks to check. So let's get started. This
first sign is one about mismatched or cheap finishes. And I don't just mean hardware, I mean the whole picture, like your cabinet pools, your faucet, your light fixtures. I'm not talking about the finishes on your cabinet. Of course, that is important, but I'm talking about when you might be mixing metals and choosing metals and hardware for your kitchen. If those are all fighting each other, you've got three different metals with no connectivity, no rhyme or reason, that could be one of the first things the eye catches. Even if you can't name why something feels off, none of it is coordinated on purpose. And it's not that mixing metals is bad. Mixing metals is actually popular right now and has been for years. It's mixing without intention that's the problem. If you have brushed brass hardware next to a chrome faucet, yeah, that doesn't read as good. That'll read as cheap. But if you have brushed brass next to an aged bronze faucet, then that reads like you meant to do it, that it was an intentional decision. Same idea with the finish quality itself. If you've put in a thin or flimsy feeling hardware, like a really cheap faucet, versus something that has real weight to it, you can usually feel the difference and see the difference before you can actually explain it. And why does this happen? Well, you might have different finishes in your kitchen because you've bought them separately over time as things either broke down and you had to buy a substitute, or you just weren't thinking about it and you didn't think about how they related to each other. The fix necessarily isn't match everything. It's choose your finishes on purpose, even when you mix them. And if you're worried and you're a little nervous about mixing finishes, it is okay not to mix them up that much. If you have a smaller kitchen, sometimes mixing can be a little too distracting. My kitchen's a decent size, about 15 feet by 15 feet, and all of my hardware is this aged honey bronze. I love it. I have some stainless steel appliances, and then my faucet is a polished nickel. Works great, and I didn't want to have different finishes all over. Larger kitchens support it, smaller kitchens, not so much. No matter what you do, you need to be intentional with your finishes. Let's
move on to sign number two that makes your kitchen look cheap. And this one's a little bit of a sneaky one, and that's your backsplash actually stopping short. This is when you've got a backsplash, but you stop it behind the stove or don't run it all the way up around your hood. So it might just hit the upper cabinets, and then you've got this little bit of bare strip between parts of your decorative hood and your other upper cabinets. It's leaving that empty space and it can be intentional, but sometimes it looks like you just forgot to put tile in or something is missing. Or another different example. This one I see a lot. When you move into a builder grade home, they'll often put the countertops in the kitchen, might be a granite or a quartz. And then they put a four to six inch high band of that same countertop as a little mini backsplash. It's that strip that runs up the wall to protect your walls. It serves a purpose. I'm not knocking that. I don't like them and I have all my clients remove them. But what will make your kitchen look cheaper is one when you leave that there instead of putting a full-length backsplash like a tile. But what I consider which makes your kitchen look even cheaper is when you leave that four to six inch backsplash strip of your countertop material and then put tile above it, and that will stop at the bottom of your upper cabinets. We only have a set space that we have to put a backsplash in, and that's 18 to 20 inches between your countertops and the bottom of your upper cabinets. That's not a lot of space. So when you take up some of that with that countertop splash, you shrink the amount of a beautiful backsplash tile that you could put, and it just makes things look kind of chopped off and stumpy, which gives that cheap look. So I want you to remove that strip that you have and a little bit of a designer tip. It's usually not glued on very well. These builders, when they're building large quantities of homes, they're not using massive quantities of glue. Usually there's little dots every 12 to 18, 20 inches. So you can literally just get a little crowbar and prop it off. And sometimes you don't even have to patch the drywall that much because the glue barely stuck. So remove that because it looks like a cheap upgrade and like you didn't go that whole step to remove it in the first place. And with everything you're doing in your kitchen, I want it to look intentional, like you meant to do it. Not like you kind of took the easy way out and were a little too lazy to remove that with one extra step. Just pop it right off and then install the backsplash that full 18 to 20 inches.
Moving right along with the third sign that your kitchen can look cheap, and this one is about lighting, and that is skipping under cabinet or accent lighting. And I get it. When you are planning your kitchen, you might not even be thinking about all of these extra decisions. But when you don't have them, it hurts the overall look. And yes, I do go over all these things in my kitchen program so that you're not missing these steps. But we can get overwhelmed when planning a kitchen. And so we think, oh, I'll deal with that later. It's actually not easy to deal with later. You want to deal with that in the beginning during construction. So if you don't have enough lighting, maybe you just have one fixture overhead on the ceiling doing all the work. It makes everything look flat in the kitchen. It's also not very flattering lighting, to be honest. No matter how nice your kitchen looks, it's gonna look like it's missing something that it wasn't thoroughly thought through. You need some sort of accent lighting, like under cabinet or interior cabinet lighting, because it elevates the entire look of your kitchen, especially as the sun goes down through our colder months here. Having that, you know, beautiful, warm, ambient light elevates the look of our space. And with under cabinet lighting, especially, it does add a functional element to it, right? It helps you see, but it just makes it look high-end. And when you have that strip of lighting, now it's often LED strips, you want to make sure there's a nice cover on it because you don't want to see that strip of light. It just can look a little less finished and polished. So you want to have that nice strip covered so it has a glow. They usually offer a plastic cover. So when I see a fully remodeled kitchen without under cabinet lighting or some sort of accent lighting, it completely cheapens the whole look and frankly looks unfinished and incomplete. And a big pet peeve I have with kitchen lighting and frankly most lighting is skipping dimmers. Nobody at 10 p.m. wants to walk into a kitchen that is as bright as the sun. Put every light in your kitchen on a dimmer so you can get that soft glow that will make your kitchen look high-end. Even if you don't have the most high-end fixtures and cabinets and countertops, that under cabinet lighting or accent lighting makes a huge difference. And if your kitchen is already done, I hate to say it, it is a little hard or more expensive to make this change because they might have to remove backsplashes, cut holes in cabinets to wire. So if it is already done, you do have a couple options. They're not the most ideal, but I think it's better than nothing. You could always do some simple peel and stick lights under your cabinets. They're battery operated. Usually you'll have to change them. Sometimes they can be remote controlled. Or like in our investment property that we have in Florida that is just a small bungalow. Financially, it didn't make sense to put the lights in. This is a very tiny kitchen. There wasn't a lot of space. We actually have a little plug-in light. I think I got it at Target. You can get it at Walmart. And it just is a little lamp, it's a little decorative touch with some decor, and it does help that. So if you haven't done it, all is not lost. But if you can do this and think of it before there are specific places within the process that you need to think about this, then it's completely worth it. And now let's move on to the bonus.
Because I always like to do a little something extra with episodes when I can. And this bonus is about cabinetry and the temptation, and I get it, it's there to buy cheap or cheaper cabinetry. Now you might say, How do you tell cheap cabinets? Or how do you know if you're looking at cheaper cabinets? One thing is to go tap on a cabinet door. Does it sound hollow or thin, or does it sound solid and sturdy? You're gonna look at gaps between your doors and your drawers, or all over between the cabinets. Open a drawer. Does it glide smooth with high-end hardware inside? There's a certain brand that is really recommended, and cheaper cabinets don't use it. And so you can get things breaking sooner. Or are the drawers not gliding very smoothly? And the one thing that most people don't think to check of is what the cabinet's actually made of. You can see two identical cabinets, and they all have the same quote, maple doors, but it's the base cabinet, the frame of it that is made differently, and that's a big difference. You can either get a good solid plywood box or other type of wood, it's going to feel solid and hold up over time, and it can support the weight of heavy countertops. Or you could spend less money and get a particle board or MDF cabinet, which is just this thin laminate. It's lighter, it flexes when you press on it. And if it ever gets wet, it will swell and bubble up. In my own kitchen, before we remodeled it, the builder used which we thought were beautiful looking cabinets. They were these espresso color, which was popular at the time. We didn't pick them, it was what came. And over time, things weren't working as well. And when we remodeled our kitchen, we could see that all the cabinets were made out of MDF. They weren't solid wood. Same with the drawers. So the fronts were wood and looked expensive, but the body and frame of them weren't. And that's not gonna hold up well. I can't tell you how many times I talk to clients and they say, I want new countertops. But putting new countertops on janky cabinets that aren't solid is like building a house on quicksand. It's not gonna hold up well. And I would hate for you to spend thousands of dollars updating your countertops if you're doing a kitchen refresh and aren't remodeling the whole kitchen. And you put them on kind of mid or basic cabinets and they don't hold up together and they'll fall apart. That is the last thing I want you to do is invest that kind of money. And then your cabinets aren't a good foundation to put them on. And the part that nobody thinks about up front is that in two or three years, if a drawer starts to warp or peel, or in my case, the bottom kind of separated from the sides and the hinge won't hold the door anymore, then you've got to fix that and you've got to repair it. And when we actually did that in our own kitchen to fix one drawer, I think we paid $300. And if you're doing that multiple times on cabinets that you already paid for once, it's not gonna feel great. Worst case, that exact style's been discontinued, and now you're stuck either living with a mismatch or replacing the whole thing. But then of course you've got these new countertops on top of it. So I want you to think that when you're shopping for cabinets, the temptation is there to get these cheaper cabinets. It's one of the larger investments within a kitchen remodel. So the sticker price up front isn't always the full price, especially if you go with the cheaper side, those savings can quietly disappear over a few years as small fixes start to add up. And like I said, with cabinetry being one of the bigger expenses in a kitchen, it makes it the worst place to find out the hard way that you cut a corner and you basically put new countertops and tile on top of a bad foundation of bad cabinetry.
All right, let's do a quick recap here. So whether you're mid-remodel right now or just starting to plan one, these are four things worth keeping on your radar. Are your finishes going to match on purpose? Are you buying pieces one at a time with no plan for how they relate? Remember, we want things to talk to each other. Is your backsplash actually going to run the full height, floor to ceiling, if you've got openings that go up that high? Or is there a shortcut about to get tiled over? And are you planning layered lighting or just one overhead fixture that's already in the ceiling? You want to think about that and elevate that space. You are investing thousands of dollars in a kitchen. Do it right. And when you're picking cabinets, are you actually checking what they're made of or just going with what they look like in the showroom? And if you've already got a kitchen, these are worth a walkthrough too. But if you're planning one, this is exactly the moment these decisions get made before it's too late to change them because it won't be as inexpensive to do it later on. You want to think about these decisions now. So with this episode, it was never really about how much you spend. It's about how many of these decisions you make on purpose and think ahead with a process before they get poured in and solidified versus how many you let happen by default. You want to take the time to make the decision well and make it right.
And if you're anywhere in that process right now, whether you're planning a kitchen remodel or just starting to notice these things in your own kitchen and know it's time to maybe think about a remodel, I invite you to join me live tomorrow. I'm taking a real kitchen submitted by someone who listens to this podcast and walking them through exactly these kinds of decisions in real time before anything set in stone and they start construction and demolition. These are the same thinking and things that I would use with a paying client that are my full service high-end clients that pay thousands of dollars to work with me. But you get to watch this happen live. And I'm going to be talking about a few hidden mistakes that people don't think about with their kitchens that can really ruin the look of them. It's free. It is tomorrow, Thursday, August 6th at 4 p.m. Pacific. The link is in the show notes. And if for some reason you can't make it, I still want you to register because you will get the replay that you'll have access to for uh a day or two to catch up. And I look forward to seeing you there tomorrow. Have a great week, and I will catch you on the next episode.