How to Personalize a Builder Grade Kitchen

The allure of a brand new home can be appealing, but the newness doesn’t compensate for a lack of personalization in a builder grade kitchen. If you are able to afford a custom kitchen, it’s worth it in visual appeal and functionality. For those of us with builder grade kitchens, here are four tips to personalize the space with the biggest impact.

Our Builder Grade Kitchen: Before

Our kitchen started as a very basic kitchen with white cabinets, standard hardware, basic granite, no tile and no light fixtures.

Design Board

I put together a design board for our kitchen to make sure I’d stay on track as I was making updates. My primary focus areas to personalize our builder grade kitchen were tile, lighting, hardware and adding color.

Adding Colorful Backsplash Tile

One of the best ways to add personality to a basic kitchen is by adding colorful backsplash tile. Most builder grade kitchens in basic homes come with a four inch stone backsplash that matches the stone countertops. In our new home, we decided to remove the four inch granite backsplash to add the tile we chose. I knew that I wanted glass tile for the backsplash and set out to find something that would fit the blue and green color palette I had in my design board. The tile I found is from Floor & Decor. It adds a nice accent to our white cabinets without being too bold.

Pendant Light Fixtures

Our kitchen came with standard in-ceiling lights, but no pendant lights to provide focused lighting over the island. Even though we have brushed nickel hardware, I thought that gold looked better with the other colors in the space, so I decided to mix metals. I picked these gold lantern pendant lights. I like to think of them as the jewelry of our kitchen!

Updating Cabinet Hardware

This seems like a very basic update to make, but it really pays off visually. Our builder grade kitchen came with basic, modern handles like these. I am not a fan of modern style, so decided to change them out for these. We had the same ones in our last house and I just love the sleek, classic look of them.

Adding Color to Personalize a Builder Grade Kitchen

I know some of the most popular decorating styles as of late do not infuse much color into the space. A few prominently feature black and white, others more muted earth tones. My personal preference is for a few bold pops of color in a bright white space. In this case, the blue woven kitchen stools at the island serve as that pop of color. They also nicely complement the blue walls of our blue and white butler’s pantry adjacent to the kitchen.

What updates have you done to your kitchen to make it your own? Tell me in the comments below!