Here today, gone tomorrow—that’s the truth of kitchen trends, which see dark hardwood cabinets one decade and see-through shelves the next. When local decorator Shane Griffin stepped up to take over an outdated kitchen here in Baton Rouge, he realized that only a few quick fixes could totally overhaul a space that suffered from cramped quarters and a drab paint job.

“Moving appliances and plumbing around really gets expensive,” he says. “Here, we simply modified the existing layout.”

All it took to make an old kitchen unrecognizable was a change in layout to the existing peninsula, hand-sanding hardwood floors to make them look like the originals, and removing dated soffits above the cabinets to extend them upward to the ceiling.

“Now the entire room is more functional, lightened and up to date,” says Griffin.

To see more from this project, check out our article in the March issue of inRegister, available on newsstands now.