The Kitchen Takes a Big Step Towards Non-Crappiness

When we moved into the house in March, here's what the main wall of our kitchen looked like - wood paneling and linoleum flooring. The walls hadn't been painted in at least a decade and were very grungy. Soon after this picture was taken, the paneling was removed and the back door in was replaced.




For the past month, we've had a very colorful kitchen to look at as we tried to decide which colors to go with. We decided on the far right dark beige (Sherwin William's Wheatfield) for that main wall, and the lightest beige on that same wall (Kilim Beige) for the other walls. Today was the day I finally had enough of looking at the walls painted like this. Off came the outlet covers and the trim and flooring was covered. Unlike most of the other floors in the house, I actually care about the kitchen floor because it's the travertine tile I installed a few months back.




Like the living room and hallway, I primed the walls and added some new texture to make the walls look like they aren't covered with a dozen layers of paint. Even with the primer you can still see the test colors peeking through. Nate: Want a ceiling fan/light?




We (I) painted the accent wall first and as soon as I started, we decided that the color looks like something you'd find in a baby's diaper. The lighter beige really made it look bad, but by itself it looks great. I broke out a sample of the darker color we had from the 1/2 bath renovation and tried it (as shown in the pic below), and we liked how that looked so we picked up a quart of that to repaint the wall.




It's not obvious in this picture, but the accent wall is now painted the darker color (Sherwin William's Tamarind) and the other walls are painted Kilim Beige. The colors go well with the flooring, but we really need to get some additional color in the kitchen now. The ceiling has yet to be painted, as I didn't have enough ceiling white to do that today. Well, I have enough, but it's flat paint and not suited for a kitchen ceiling. Plus I need to relocate the ceiling fan so it's centered over the kitchen table which means I'll have a little patch-work to do before it gets painted. Tomorrow I'll replace the outlets and switches. Overall, it looks a LOT better than it did yesterday and a metric ass-load* better than it did when we moved in.



* "metric ass-load" is a unit of measure invented in the early 40's by the Royal Navy. It's about 30% heavier than a U.S. ass-load.