Kitchen: painted!

Dear reader, I know it's been awhile since we've updated you on our progress.  Believe me, we're not neglecting you when that happens.  It's our poor house that's being neglected.  So, when faced with a three-day weekend, we wanted to have a little fun.  In our case, that means three uninterrupted days of housework.

We divided and conquered.  Gabe got to go outside in the beautiful weather and plant the garden.  I got to stay inside and sand and paint the kitchen.  

Normally I can't wait to paint.  It is the most satisfying part of home improvement, in my opinion. With the kitchen, however, we primed it just after Thanksgiving and it has languished ever since.  We had tried wet-sanding the joint compound on the walls and ceilings for the first time.  Wet sanding is a technique in which you use a special sponge to essentially wet down and wipe off excess joint compound from your bare drywall.  The advantage to this is that there is no dust.  Dry sanding with special screens or sanding pads creates an especially hellish kind of dust that will infiltrate absolutely every nook and cranny of your house. 

So we did the wet sanding and it seemed to be going just swell.  In our effort to get as much work done as possible during our Thanksgiving kitchen blitz, we slapped up a coat of primer on the ceiling as soon as it dried.  It was dark out.  When we saw it in the daylight the next day, we realized we had made a big mistake!  It was terribly lumpy, our worst ceiling yet.  We should be getting better at this, not worse! And because we had primed it already, it was going to be nearly impossible to fix.  Thank goodness we hadn't also primed the walls! We probably would have it we weren't planning on doing those in red primer.  

We touched up the walls with dry sanding pads, which are firm and flat and made a nice, smooth surface.  We realized that because the wet sanding sponges are wet and floppy, it would be very difficult to ever make it smooth.  Maybe we're missing something. It turned out that the combo of the two techniques worked well - the dust was reduced overall because so much material was removed with the wet sanding first, and the results were really good on the walls.  

That brings us back to our wrecked ceiling.  I meant to do a post when our friend Colin (a favorite here at the Corner Lot for his deck-building and general handy-person skills) came over near Christmastime and helped us plow through a long list of annoying things that needed to get done.  One of those things was attempting to fix our ceiling.  He talked us down from a ledge, so to speak, when we were considering skim-coating the whole thing.  We didn't have the proper tools and he was convinced we didn't need to endure that level of mess or difficulty.  So we scraped and patched and scraped and patched.  It was grim.  

We did the best we could.  Then, suddenly, it was May!  We just couldn't bring ourselves to sand our patching job because we were too busy living in it and it is such a pain to clean up the results.  So I found a solution: just let the whole house get dirty enough that it needs a top-to-bottom cleaning anyway, then sand away.  

So, here we are.  I spent Saturday packing away everything that wasn't in a cupboard and sanding that darn ceiling once and for all.  I knew it wouldn't be perfect, but we just got so sick of it being not done that it didn't matter anymore. The unfinished ceiling was really holding us back, because you have to paint the ceiling before you paint the walls, and you have to paint the walls before you install the trim, and you have to do everything before you finish the floors...and we had a self-imposed moratorium on putting anything on our mostly-bare walls in all the downstairs rooms until that sanding was done. So, before bedtime I had it all primed again and we finally ready to move on. I was quite proud of myself.

The sad part about me making this short story long is that there's no way I can illustrate to you in photos the progress we made.  A white ceiling is a white ceiling is a white ceiling in pictures.  And the walls are still red, just more red.  But I'll do the best I can.

Here's before - it's a little scruffy looking.  Very flat primer on both the ceiling and the walls.

And after: more primer and super flat ceiling paint hiding a multitude of sins - which will hopefully be even less obvious when we move past the bare-bulb phase.

Here's the best I could do to show the difference in our old red and new red.  The new red, Benjamin Moore's Chili Pepper, is on the top.  In the photo, it's still wet so it looks shiny, but it's pretty matte now that it's dry.  The old red, Behr's Poinsettia, is on the bottom.  This is just the primer tinted that color - the real top coat was an enamel, I believe.  Extra shiny to highlight every...single...bump...**shudder**.  It was much more orangey.  Let's just say we don't miss it. 

I am totally awesome at free-handing a crisp paint line, no blue tape necessary (that's why Gabe gets to play all day in the garden).  Just another one of my many skills that is quite useful yet will get me nowhere in life. Coulda been a surgeon if I didn't hate blood and guts. 

What remains of the wall between the kitchen and dining room got Country Dairy like the living room and dining room.  We figured that would help open up the room visually and balance out the red so you don't feel like you're in a big red box.  

As a bonus, I finally got to paint this godforsaken beam!  This might be the most momentous part of this whole day.  The ceiling has been in a state of distress for 6 months, but that beam has been exposed and unfinished for, no joke, eight freaking years since that wall came down.  It also got the Country Dairy treatment. 

Saturday was a beautiful day, 75 and sunny with a breeze, perfect drying weather.  I was able to paint non-stop from about 10 am to 4 pm. Ceiling white, Country Dairy, two coats of Chili Pepper, done!  It was a watershed moment for the kitchen.  Now two aspects of this kitchen are totally done - the counters and the paint - and all those other projects I mentioned earlier can happen.  Hopefully it won't be another 6 months.