A Long Work Weekend

Silly us - what do we decide to do on our Fourth Anniversary weekend AND pepito is at the grandparents house for four whole days?  Relax?  Not a chance!!  We painted the kitchen cabinets and countertops of course!  Doesn't that sound like a wonderful way to recoup from taking care of a sick baby?  Ha!  Though, it is much nicer being in the kitchen at 3am making a bottle now then it was a week ago.

Friday morning I drove baby up to Atlanta to meet my Dad at Grandmother's house and ended up she was having a lunch thing with my aunt/uncle and their kids, a close friend with her baby and an aunt who had managed not to meet pepito yet - so I was there a little longer than planned.  Lucky for me - I got to miss taking down all the doors, with 13 screws each, and painting them.  Sweet.

We've always loved white cabinets, black countertops, checkered floor.  Nothing fancy.  Just simple.  Classic.  Can't go wrong.  This was our plan and we had figured out a way that we could do it NOW and not later.  Well the floor is later, but whatever.  I can NOT look down.  Maybe.  We'll see...  So we had a plan.  (and let me note here, that THE PLAN had been made when we chose all the colors and schemes in the house, not made on a whim, just saying.  there was no backup)

Sam made the executive decision that he wanted to spray paint the doors - fine by me - it's really his deal this time.  The cost was a little more but the finish would be so much better he said.  And truth - the enamel finish is nice.  Shiny - but super cleanable.  Perfect.  So, I get home, change into paint clothes (you know you have some too), and start painting the boxes.  I almost forgot to mention - that we learned the hard way that when painting with spray paint, it is an absolute necessity to make sure you get ALL coats done in a timely fashion.  If you wait until the next day to finish up - you will be stripping the paint off and starting all over.  Yay us. Atleast it was only on five of the doors...

Three coats later - we're done.  Easy cheesey.  We might get to go to bed at a relatively decent hour.  Wait - Sam wanted to hang a couple doors to see how it all looked - and what do you know - the whites don't match.  Of course they don't.  So at 11:00 pm, we're sitting on the floor, well I'm sitting - Sam is pacing like always, trying to figure out what we can do to fix it that hopefully doesn't involve spending anymore money.  I go digging through the storage/paint closet and come out with the only two semi-gloss paints we own.  One is Forest Lichen, our bathroom color, and the other is a leftover from a job, which is a pretty blue gray.

I grab a craft paint brush and crudely put up samples.  We sit.  We stare.  We talk it out.  I really thought we'd have all white cabinets.  But the two tone look could be good.  Or it could be bad.  Very bad.  We don't want to look like we're taking the kitchen backwards.  How much worse than what we got could it be.  Only us. What color should the walls be.  Do you think I could find fabric to make the blue work then and then we don't have to repaint the walls.  But I love my poppies.  And so on and so forth.

We end up choosing Forest Lichen.  I can keep my poppy window treatments, it's less of a contrast, much softer, but we have to repaint the walls.  I just can't make the china blue work anymore.  No big deal.  I'm sure we have a gallon of something that work....  I believe we got one coat on that night, then two more in the morning.  And three fresh new coats on the buffet that was previously D.O.N.E.  Yep - 12 more doors that had to come off with 13 screws each.  Thank goodness we had a spaghetti/garbage disposal incident a couple years ago and needed a drill with a cord - best thing we ever bought.

I'll sum up the rest of the kitchen - we couldn't get the sprayer hardware out of the sink and thought we were going to have to replace our entire sink because of it.  Which was going to be irritating because the only one we could afford to put back was the exact one we have - not in the plan.  But Sam remembered the reciprocating saw and just cut the thing off - 60 minutes and a lot of sink searching later.  I don't know why we can't be brilliant immediately...  Sam redid the plumbing underneath because the pipe had rotted out.  Whoever did it the first time didn't install the pipes at the right level so it never drains right and we will have to do this every year.  No big deal - just add it to the list.  Faucet gets installed without a hitch, I tape off the freshly painted cabinets, and we start painting the countertops.  Somehow we didn't get it quite as even as I would've preferred, but it was hard enough to live without putting things on the counter this time and I don't plan to do it again anytime in the near future.  It's good enough and a vast improvement anyhow.

So - that's our kitchen makeover.  Oh, and Sam spent 2 hours detailing our oven because he's decided it's the centerpiece to our new kitchen.  Fine by me - it was old and dirty.  Plus, he figured out to get the nonworking huge timer box off the top, so I'm super pleased.  Happy new kitchen.  Now, to paint the walls and maybe we'll  be done with paint.  Yeah right - I've said that before! Ha!!