See, by midafternoon Friday, we had a kitchen with a floor. It was great! It was also a mess. And the walls were... bad. I mean, I was okay with leaving them white for a while and painting gradually after we'd moved back in. But once the new cabinets were up, it was obvious where the old cabinets had been. The baseboard was missing in one area, and the horrible old vinyl-wire shelving along one wall just cheapened the appearance of the whole kitchen. It was time for more changes. So, we decided to paint. Immediately. Pictures and more after the jump.
This decision was not taken lightly. We entertained our parents this weekend and I still thought even then that I'd "get around to" painting over the next week or so. But Saturday night, after the folks had left town, Smittygirl and I went to Lowe's and found paint we liked. And we decided it was time to do it, do it all at once, before we moved back in, and be done with it. That evening we went to Wal-Mart to get some fun storage stuff (racks for the back of the cabinet doors to put ziploc bags and aluminum foil in. How neat! I never thought of that!). We managed to get a $90 over-the-toilet storage cabinet for the guest bath for $30. It was on a "store employees marked the price wrong and nobody would come address the situation, so we took it for $30 thanks to our very nice checkout clerk."
Sunday we shopped with purpose. We also removed all the food off the old shelving and tore the shelves out of the wall. This is what the wall looked like afterward.
We managed to get a baker's rack through craigslist on Sunday, too, which we wanted to put there... but not until after it was painted. You may note that the ceiling looks funny in that picture. More on that later.
We selected our paint and I decided I'd start painting on Monday morning. I also made a desperate phone call to my father seeking assistance. He consented. Thank goodness! Well, not much left for it then but to take some before pictures, and here they are.
This is the sink wall. Note the plate rack above the sink. Smittygirl's special request.And this here is the other wall, along the stove. Note how much more space there is between the stove and the fridge. It's not huge, about three feet and change, but man, when you've lived with a 14" countertop in that space for four years, the change is night and day.
Now, there was one other thing that needed to be done, had, in fact, needed to be done for months, years in fact, almost since I moved in. Back in December 2003--the very day we caught Saddam, in fact--there was a tremendous roof leak into my kitchen and front hallway. I'd had the wall and ceiling in the front hall repaired some years ago, but the kitchen ceiling was still... well, it still looked like this here. I took this picture on Sunday.
Note that the paint is off in a large section of the ceiling--it was latex paint of all things (on a ceiling?), peeled right off in my hands. There was some damage to one side of the light fixtures, and more significant damage to the right there toward the hallway. Gypsum had fallen down. Note, please, that I took this on Sunday. Have I mudded and taped? Pulled down bad gypboard and replaced it? Caulked? No. None of that. And I was going to start painting on Monday?Well, I knew I had to do the ceiling before I could do the walls, at least in that area. It was my hope that I could get a paint to match the existing ceiling paint close enough that I wouldn't need to paint the whole thing.
Yeah, right. Sure. The paint is 20 years old. It's basically faded to Antique White, and they don't sell Antique White ceiling paint. Plus, I didn't want to put latex up there again, it's such a mess to clean up. They said a quart of flat white would work... I just didn't want to do the whole ceiling. Of course, I should have painted it before they did the floors... and I should have painted the walls while the cabinets were off on Tuesday afternoon, but what can you do?
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