Updating your Builder's grade Bathroom and Kitchen

Our house was a classic builder's grade home with all light fixtures and hardware being the cheapest stuff available they could use. So we changed them out to something more appealing. We updated both bathrooms and our kitchen. With just small upgrades you can completely change the way your room looks.




We first changed the Master bathroom Fixtures, handles, faucets, shower curtain rods, and shower head.

Bathroom Before....  

We changed out faucets, lightning, cabinet pulls, added a rain head shower head, and added a curved shower curtain bar. We painted the bathroom as the finishing touch to get rid of the builder's grey.  (We also later framed the mirror in the bathroom. See my other post on how we did it without buying an expensive framed mirror)

Up Close of new faucets. We purchased these from a Local Discount Building Supply store at a fraction of the cost they are sold at the big box home improvement stores. These faucets swivel which is the main reason we bought them. 

We changed out the cabinet pulls to something a little more modern. We also used these same pulls in our kitchen. These were purchased at Lowes. 

When we put up new curved shower curtain rod we went up higher with the bar than the normal length. This draws your eye up and makes the master bathroom feel much larger. We also bought two decorative trim moulding blocks and secured them to the wall and then attached the curved shower rod to them for added "Looks" and to keep the rod from being flush up against the wall. 

New rain head shower head, bought from Bed Bath and Beyond. I will tell you this shower head is amazing and its a low flow shower head!

This did not take much time or money to do this update. Our bathroom turned out very nice and was an easy DIY project.

In our kitchen we changed out the light fixture, which was that half globe thing almost all new builder's grade homes come with.  It put off zero light and made the kitchen so extremely dark.

(Had to turn off the light to get a good picture for you to be able to see)

Old Light Fixture in Kitchen.... 

New Fixture that puts out a lot of light now!

We then changed the cabinet pulls to the same ones in the bathroom. They matched our dishwasher handle very well. 

Old Pulls....

New Pulls....

We then changed out our Kitchen Faucet... 

Old Faucet.... (Disclaimer... that is my son's FAKE knife you see in the drain. It was part of his Halloween costume that decided to start leaking red food coloring everywhere. )

New Faucet. It was purchased at Home Depot for under $100.00.

We did add a tile and slate backsplash in our kitchen also. You can look at my post specifically about how to DIY your backsplash. We will one day add granite counter tops but thats a large expense and not something we will do ourselves. 

I hope you enjoyed this post and that it is helpful and inspiring to do these simple upgrades yourself. We did not get it done over night. We have done many upgrades to our builder's grade home over the last four years of owning it. Just take your time and plan to do this on the weekends at your own pace and budget. We have some "Big Projects" we want to do, hardwood floors, tile in bathrooms, and an office re-do. As we get them done I will add posts about them. 

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to post a comment. 

Thanks, Selena