Brit Arnesen remembers riding her bike past this house when she was a kid growing up in Kokomo, Indiana, and thinking it was the ugliest house in the neighborhood. “It had a brown roof with brown gutters and brown trim, and then a yellowish-colored siding. It was really bad,” says the designer.

When Brit and her husband, Derek, bought the foreclosed house years later, it wasn’t faring much better, having sat empty for five years. The couple’s original thought was to gut it, renovate it themselves, and put it back on the market.

$554 Windows	$6,091 Appliances	$1,938 Lighting
$2,720 Cabinets	$110 Paint	$2,110 Countertops
$179 Knobs & Pulls	$543 Tiles	$259 Sink
$183 Faucet	$407 Open Shelving	$757 Tiptoe Stools
$543 Drywall	$178 Wall Moulding	$115 Built-In Trash Can
Grand Total: $16,687

When the couple first purchased the home five years ago, the main floor was compartmentalized into four separate rooms. They knocked down walls to let more natural light flow through the plan and rehabbed the kitchen right away, pulling out layers of laminate from the counter to the flooring, the latter sandwiched with black mold. After investing so much sweat equity, Brit and Derek decided that they wanted to stay put in the home after all.

After living with the resulting design for a few years, however, Brit had some new ideas about how to improve on it. So, earlier this year, Brit and Derek tackled another kitchen remodel for the One Room Challenge, a biannual event wherein participating designers and homeowners chronicle a room makeover accomplished in just six weeks.

For this go-around—Brit’s third time doing the One Room Challenge—the kitchen remodel involved swapping out the perimeter counters, tweaking the appliance layout so the rear wall elevation was more pleasing to the eye, and instilling architectural detail into the open floor plan. New lighting and custom accents made by Brit and Derek, like the range hood and cabinet pulls, combine for a more “organic, postmodern” kitchen scheme.

Brit started with an elongated keyhole arch that now separates the kitchen and dining room from the main living area. “I wanted to divide the two rooms a little bit to make them feel like their own spaces, without completely blocking them off from each other,” says Brit, who was inspired by a longtime affection for Art Deco architecture and decor, as well as Casework’s Hightower showroom in Chicago and Sister City by Ace Hotel in NYC.

Brit spent three days plastering the curves herself, repeating the motif in two smaller doorways that also enter into the room. “It was almost like sculpting,” says Brit. “And the dust is just so insidious. It gets everywhere. You don’t even realize it. You go into your bedroom and brush the top of the dresser, and there’s dust there.”

The couple then replaced the stove units with a lower profile range from Samsung, and Brit primed and painted the dark grout lines in the tile backsplash, using chalk paint over primer to achieve a lighter and brighter look. “Once I got all of that painted, that’s when I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to be really cool.’ Because the black grout was so bold. And I really wanted a softer look, with a more natural and earthy tone,” says Brit.

Several more DIY projects provided the finishing touches—from the custom cabinet pulls to the fluted range hood over the stove and new dining room table.

When asked what predisposes her to DIY, Brit credits a typically limited budget and innate creativity. “I really enjoy creating things,” says Brit. “And so, I think that it was not being able to afford what I really wanted to buy years ago, combined with wanting to see if I could actually create it myself.”

The project wrapped up in time for the celebratory reveal in early July, with Brit calculating the total budget to be around $16,687. This amount includes what was saved from the first renovation, as well as the retail price of any items gifted via the One Room Challenge sponsors.

Now, with much of the house all done, and fewer projects on the horizon, Brit is enjoying some much-deserved down time. “We’ve seriously worked on this house, in some shape or form, almost every single day for the past five years,” says Brit. “I’m just not quite ready to leave yet.”

More Budget Breakdown:

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A Portland Designer Jazzes Up His ’50s Kitchen for Less Than $26K

Project Credits:

Interior Design: britdotdesign / @britdotdesign

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