Paint!

One of the other components of this project is painting the untiled walls, so this seemed like a good time to start.  We chose a combo paint and primer as the walls were already covered and a light color.  Honestly, if the paint weren’t of such poor quality and effort in here, we might not be working on the kitchen at all, so thanks flippers!

We’ve used Behr before and really enjoyed its coverage and durability.  When prepping for the tile, I scrubbed down as much wall as I could easily without getting too crazy. We have open shelving above our cabinets and it’s a stand-on-the-counter kind of situation for me to work up there, so cleaning is super fun.  I also opted to remove the outermost cabinet doors to be able to reach the entire wall.   We’re going to be revamping the cabinets as well, so this isn’t an excessive step to get it done right.  I’d recently cleaned behind the fridge (a super scary Halloween for sure, this year) so just had to pull it out and give a quick once-over to the wall.  Yes, the kitchen is a barely usable disaster, so let’s just let it go the whole way, ok?  The dishwasher stays so I don’t even care.  

While hanging out on the counter to clean the walls above the cabinets, I realized the ceiling was badly painted and that there was even wall paint on the ceiling.  I pulled out the surrounds for the can lights and realized they’d not bothered to do that, so we took it as a sign we were supposed to repaint the ceiling while we were at it.  This made me very cranky, but at least we had ceiling paint onhand from a redo in our previous apartment. It made me so cranky, in fact, that Alex banged it out because he is almost a foot taller and therefore can reach and fit more patience in than me. 

I turned around one day and he was also plowing through the wall painting.  I had been bumming about the holidays this year, and he seemed to know that getting this space going would really cheer me up.  With the exception of one night where I helped at my height, he did most of the paint over a weekend.  We chose this blue together and really liked it, but when it went up on the walls, whoa was that a lot.  We felt less color-shocked once things started to come back in for me to bake a bit for the holiday, and now it’s fine.  Apparently even I can be overwhelmed by color.

After the grout had cured properly, Alex took to the joints with sealer to prevent damage to all of our hard work.  He was extremely careful and used a small brush and wiped up drips well, because they can leave a white residue on tile surfaces.  As always, Nyobi helped.