Reduce Kitchen Makeover Costs by Refinishing Countertops

When you plan to remodel a kitchen, you have to be prepared to have a healthy budget if you want to get the results you are looking for. You will need to change or update your appliances, paint the floors or walls, redo some tiling and do something about the scratched and marred surface of your countertop. Countertops quite often set the tone in a kitchen and add to its elegance and ambiance. This is because it is a part of kitchen furniture, which is quite often the focal point and can help to dramatically increase its style quotient. However, countertops are quite expensive and any kitchen remodeling project that requires these to be changed can add greatly to the budget. This is where countertop refinishing comes to the rescue and enables you to change the looks of the kitchen at much lower costs. The added advantage is that the mess that accompanies the complete change of countertops, from breaking, removing debris, and installing the new unit, can be completely avoided or lessened to a fair degree.

Refinishing of a countertop involves putting on new laminate over the existing surface. Fortunately, most countertops come in standard sizes, and laminate material for the refinishing will easily be available, thus reducing any wastage. However, if your countertop is not a standard size, some wastage may be unavoidable and will slightly increase your cost. Fortunately, such laminates can always be used for other small projects in a home, and do not really get wasted.

The laminates available nowadays give you a very wide array of textures, styles, and colors, and as these are mass-produced in the thousands, they remain quite affordable. Laminates have a thickness of just a few millimeters and are therefore quite light and very easy to handle. This does them to require to be handled carefully.

Preparation of the countertop is one very important prerequisite for any countertop refinishing. You need to strip the earlier laminate and the glue that held it down. Most improvement stores will carry chemical solutions that will enable this task to be completed quite easily. The removal of laminate is made easier if you use a hot iron on its surface, as this will cause the laminate to expand and detach itself from the surface. You can then use a chisel to make cuts on the old laminate and allow you to literally peel it away. Once this is done, use the chemical solutions to ensure that you remove all vestiges of the earlier glue. You then need to use a sander on the exposed wood so that surface gets prepared for allowing the new laminate to adhere to the surface.

Make sure that you have the right glue for the bonding of the new laminate to your prepared surface of the countertop. Spread the glue evenly and thinly on the surface. Use a glue spreader to ensure that glue is spread properly and extends to the edges of the countertop base. Put on the laminate carefully and roll it with a heavy roller to ensure that are no air bubbles and the laminate adheres completely to the surface. Some glue will seep out of the edges and may need to be cleaned off. Give it some time, preferably a day or two, to set and your new refinished countertop is ready for use.