Our $50 DIY Range Hood Cover - Dear Lillie Studio

Good afternoon! Last week I decided to finally pull the trigger on our DIY Range Hood Cover. I knew from the moment we decided to go with this house (based entirely on it’s location and not really the house itself, you can read more about that decision here) that I would want to make a cover for the hood. I like the look of some metal range hoods but not this one (and the whole placement of everything on the back wall kind of drove me crazy). Because we move a lot for my husband’s job, I don’t typically get too hung up on buying a house that I don’t love because realistically it’s not going to be a forever house. However, I do look at it through the lens of what I can do to make it more our style and try to decide on the most cost-effective way to do that. When we’ve purchased older homes that really need some updating (like this one -downstairs can be viewd here and upstairs here or this one -downstairs can be viewed here and upstairs here) I don’t mind ripping things out but when we’ve bought newer homes I really try to do my best to work with what is there and not be wasteful so with that in mind I look to make inexpensive cosmetic changes that can give the overall feel I prefer (you can see some of those homes here, here. and here).

With that thought process in mind, I wanted to keep the existing hood in place and just essentially build a cover to go around it. When I first saw the house, I thought that we could remove all of the upper cabinets and I could build a big statement hood. I realized though that I didn’t want to give up that cabinet space because there were so few upper cabinets to begin with and I knew I’d regret removing them even if it did look prettier. So, I knew the biggest trick was going to be working around the cabinets and the fact that the sides of the hood came out almost flush with the sides of the cabinet which gave me almost no room to add trim around the base of the hood. This limited the overall style I could go with and ruled out several of my favorite style hoods. Ultimately I decided to go with a super basic look that went with the style of the cabinets. I initially just built the shelf over the sink (which you can read about here) and held off on the hood cover and spent months playing around in my head with how I was going to be able to make the hood work. This week though I finally decided to tackle it and it only ended up taking me about a day and a half. So even though it was a very mentally challenging project, it was a pretty quick one overall once I finally figured out how I was going to do it.

Because it was so specific to my space it isn’t really worth doing a tutorial but essentially what I did was build a frame in the area between the cabinets that I attached to studs to make sure it was secure and then kind of worked out from there. I had some leftover lattice and thicker plywood from our laundry room makeover so only had to by two 2′ by 4′ pieces of 1/4 plywood for $17 each and then two 6″ by 4 feet thin pieces that I used for the bottom part that I think were around $8 each. And then I used paint leftover from Lola’s room so it only ended being right around $50 of wood that I had to purchase. If I hadn’t had leftover wood from the laundry room and paint from Lola’s room I still think it would only have cost a little over $100 which is a great price for a project that makes this kind of impact (and having one custom made can be incredibly expensive, although if you aren’t working in such a specific space there are some good options for purchasing some on Etsy).

So here is what the kitchen looked like when we first saw the house: