Getting a “New” Kitchen Using “Elbow Grease”
When a new kitchen is installed, part of what makes it attractive is the fact that it is one hundred percent clean. Older kitchens have little semi-hidden pockets of crumbs, crud, and grease. When we attack the kitchen with our normal cleaning, we may miss these little places and yet they are visible enough to say “this is an old kitchen.”
While it is not fun to live with an outdated kitchen, a regular reminder that you don’t have the money for a new one, you can make the outdated kitchen look like new with very careful, systematic cleaning.
It is possible to do this cleaning in a single day, although it may be mentally easier to do this for an hour a day across several days. If you feel you have to accomplish the whole thing in one session, you are likely to put it off. If you decide that you will see what you can accomplish in fifteen minutes to an hour a day, you will find you have time for this project. Steady progress on a project like this will actually energize you to continue.
The idea is to take one little part of the kitchen and to clean it until it is like it was when new. Divide your kitchen systematically. For example, if you have a wall with cabinets, then you have the upper cabinets, the counter and backsplash area, the lower cabinets and the floor near the cabinets. You can further divide this left to right: the left-most upper cabinet, the counter and backsplash area beneath the left-most upper cabinet, the left-most lower cabinet.
In your little space that you have chosen, the job is to clean every surface. You might need a combination of warm water and dishwashing soap along with degreasers and abrasive cleaners. Don’t worry about the rest of the kitchen. You will simply work on this little area to remove the layers of stuff that hide the “new” that is there.
You may want to get a friend to help you identify the areas that normally get forgotten when you clean. If you have lived a long time with a room, it is often difficult to see details in it. Or you can pretend you are going to sell the house and try to look at it through the eyes of a potential buyer. Sometimes that can help you see it anew.
A super-thorough cleaning will not change the style of the kitchen but it will make some of those out-of-date choices look a lot better. The experience of doing this will help you to maintain this thorough cleansing because you will know where the dirt lurks.