IKEA Play Kitchen Revamp – How to Guide

 

T  The IKEA Play Kitchen Revamp… a project we’ve been meaning to get round to doing for about two years now but never found the time.

After spending so much on our own kitchen revamp we wanted to be those parents who had a quirky play kitchen in the corner of the room. But in reality, fast forward two years and her kitchen was still sitting there bare as the day it was born. It turns out we didn’t actually have any spare time (or money) to makeover Ettie’s kitchen when we were still putting all our resources into finishing off the actual house.

With most of the main rooms in the house now finished and the ones we haven’t done still waiting to be built, Ettie (and now Ollie’s) kitchen was moving further up the to do list. So last weekend I decided to give the makeover a shot.

The budget we had for this was zero. But we’re lucky in that we had a lot of DIY materials sitting around the house from the decorating we’ve done in other rooms. I’d say if you were trying to achieve the look we’ve gone for it would cost about £50. I’ve listed most of the materials we used below.

Materials:

 

• Wood Primer;
• Spray Paint Primer
• Gold Spray Paint;
• Valspar wood paint;
• Marble Vinyl:
• Star Tiles.
• Stanley knife, scissors and a credit card

Getting Started

I’m going to start this by saying ‘I’m no DIY expert’. So when you scroll on and see the photo’s of my method you’ll see it isn’t the most well thought out. I pretty much woke up one morning, decided the kitchen had to go and so took a trip to the shed to see what I could salvage to spruce it up a bit. I learned a few tips and tricks along the way. So I’m writing this guide to save you making the mistakes I made. In the hope that you’re able to achieve a finish which is much more profesh!

 

1. Prep and Prime

First up for our IKEA Play Kitchen Revamp, I removed all the ‘brass wear'(plastic taps and legs etc,) from the kitchen and gave the whole thing a sand down to make sure the woodwork had enough grip for the paint to stick.  After that I used a wood primer as the base coat (the same stuff we used on our skirting boards) and painted it all over – with a little help from Ettie. She loved getting involved and I wasn’t too bothered about her making a mess as it was only the base coat. I quickly smoothed over any drips she made with my brush once we’d finished and make sure she left the doors with the glass in them to me .

 

2. Spray paint the taps and sink

While the base coat on the kitchen was drying, I primed all of the taps, hooks, legs, pots and pans etc with a white spray paint primer that we had left over from spraying our kitchen bin. With the primer, I added one light coat,  left it for 15 minutes and touched it up with a second coat. But when spray painting with the colour you intend to use, I’d add a couple of fine thin coats to slowly build up the coverage, because if you try to do too much all at once the paint will drip.

I used the gold spray paint we had left over from spraying a light in our toilet and gave a really great metallic finish. But there are some lovely rose gold colours out there too. I found the gold paint a lot runnier than the primer and it took longer to dry. In fact I had to wash off the first coat and start over because it run into drips. I think I ended up doing four or five coats in total. Particularly on the metal pans because they were harder to cover.

 

3. Paint the Woodwork

After leaving the primer to dry overnight, I started painting the body of the kitchen the next day. I had a tin of Hauge Blue emulsion left over from the dining room and at first glance it seemed to be working a treat. But once I’d left it to dry a while, I realised it wasn’t going to last five minutes with my two battering the kitchen. So I had to come up with an alternative solution. Luckily we had friends round for dinner that day and my pal Amy offered to give me the left overs from a sideboard she’d recently upcycled. The blue was very similar to the blue we have in our dining room and the Valspar wood paint was really easy work with. So I gave the whole of the woodwork two coats in that and it was much more durable.

 

4. Transform the Worktop

I had some spare vinyl plastic left over from when I covered the top of Ettie’s toy table (also from Ikea). So I used this to make the worktop. It’s cheap as chips from places like Amazon and Wilkos and for the price I think it’s really effective.

To make the worktop I removed the upper area of the kitchen and lay the vinyl plastic out over the top, measuring out the length I needed and roughly cutting it to size. I started by securing the first edge of the vinyl over the counter edge furthest away from. Then I made sure it was secure by using a credit card to smooth out the air bubbles.

I then began to slowly peel away the backing paper to secure the vinyl over the rest of the counter top, pushing out air bubbles with a tea towel as I moved along.  When I got to the final edge, I secured it again using a credit card to smooth over the folds. I then trimmed the excess using a stanley knife.

I cut out the holes for the sink and stove using the same blade and worked the vinyl around the edges, rolling the credit cards over the folds to secure it into place (it doesn’t matter if these edges aren’t perfect as the sink and stove will over it anyway!).

To make a really smooth finish on the outside edges and corners, my top tip is to use a hairdryer on the vinyl. This will stretch it and make it easier to work with. I say this is my tip – it actually came from Stu and he only told me as I was working on the edging to the back of the kitchen (why did I start from the front?!). It was a great tip as it made the edging stickier too. So I’ll be using it next time whenever the vinyl has to be replaced.

 

5. Secure the Tiles

Stu didn’t want me to show photos of this bit because he said it was cheating. But I thought it was genius. Instead of faffing about with tile adhesive and tiling a piece of plasterboard which was our original plan, Stu suggested getting a couple of wooden batons and securing the tiles into place using those. Because the tiles we were using were pretty large, it made this method pretty straightforward.

However if you wanted more of a metro-tile finish, it might be worth tiling onto a piece of plasterboard first. We used four batons in total to secure one and a half tiles. We didn’t bother with the grout as it was getting late. But you could always add that in to finish it off properly.

Then it was just a case of putting everything back together. And Voila the IKEA Play Kitchen Revamp was done. We rewarded ourselves with a Gin. Ettie was convinced she had a new kitchen and we were finally ‘those parents’ with the trendy play kitchen . For the next couple of weeks at least until they trash it 😉

If you enjoyed reading this IKEA Play Kitchen Revamp post and would like to see more DIY posts from me, just pop me a message saying what you fancy in the comments below. I’m fancying having a go at panelling our bedroom nex. But we’ll wait and see if it actually happens x

 

You can see our full renovation journey so far on Instagram @theHalcyonYears