Our 50’s Diner Kitchen

Our 50’s Diner Kitchen- yes, this is really the kitchen we use at our house.

These days the housing market is just crazy, and when I went looking for a house I had pretty high hopes- I wanted it to be BIG for starters, and as I had limited income I needed an apartment to offset mortgage costs. I also wanted a large piece of land so I could build a garage for my cars. These things left me short by about $100,000 on my budget.

But lucky for me this great house came up on the market- in my price range! It had everything I wanted. The only catch? It was extremely dated. Almost every room was mint green and off white, including the moldings, doors, and radiator heaters. I had little to no money for renovations, and oak cupboards were NOT in my future.

The “Before” kitchen. This is how it looked when I moved in- see all the tiny little cupboards up top, and the glare of the white?

Originally my plan was to simply paint the kitchen white with red cupboards and buy some funky red accessories for decoration. But once it was painted it didn’t really jive the way I’d hoped. There were too many little cupboards for starters, so we pulled them all off and puttied over all the holes. Then we painted the insides of the cupboards white and all the trim black.

Cupboards with the trim painted black

You can see in this picture the mint green on the walls! Once the cupboards were finished we painted them a nice soft white and it really made the red and black pop! Because the trim was separate from the cupboards themselves it was easy to paint the trim with virtually no taping. I found the paint had a nicer finish when rolled on with a small roller as opposed to a bristle brush.

Next we painted all the cupboard doors red (we couldn’t get a cupboard paint, so we used regular interior paint and it worked out fine- drying time was a bit longer but it still worked.) We also splurged on new hardware- brushed silver knobs (25 for $24.99 at Kents) and hinges (20 for $34.99 at Kents.)

A bottom cabinet with the red drawer installed

With the knobs and hardware on, we set about installing all the cupboard doors and the drawers as well. We screwed them into the existing holes with very little issue- some holes were a bit stripped out so we slightly adjusted where the doors were going.

The biggest issue with this renovation was what we were going to do with all those little cupboards up top. First I tried putting all my pots and pans up there but they were virtually unreachable. I thought about putting some ornaments on display but realized I didn’t really have very many and they were pretty hard to get a good look at up there.

My boyfriend went scavenging for old cars one day and came home with a bag of dirty old cola bottles which he cleaned and put in the little cupboards, which gave it the absolute perfect look for a 50’s diner kitchen! Included in his haul were some bottles from Keep Cool, Gideons, Nesbitts, Suncrest, Pepsi Cola, and Pop Shoppe. It took a lot of work to clean them out, some of them were filled with mud. We filled the laundry tub with hot soapy water and spent a good bit of time rinsing them and pulling out dirt with Popsicle sticks but I think the result was worth it!

Because of the size and shape of the kitchen it is sometimes difficult to take pictures but I think you’ll get the idea from these images!

Our bottles display spans both sides of the kitchen, all the way across the cupboards

One side of the kitchen, completed

We were lucky enough to have a counter top that worked with the red and black theme, so there was no need to replace that. Total cost of renovating this kitchen is listed here:

*3 gallons of paint: $90 (Kents)

*rollers, brushes, paint trays, and tape: $20 (Dollarama)

*2 buckets of hinges $70 (Kents)

*2 packages of knobs $50 (Kents)

*assorted cola bottles (free! Scavenged in woods)

*Today’s Menu sign over the sink (gifted by a friend)

*Bubble Gum Machine (already had this, boyfriend restored it for free)

*Red Betty Crocker Kettle and Toaster: $60 (Walmart)

*Red Betty Crocker Kitchen Utensils: $10 (Dollarama)