Bye bye flat and yellow..

Mom came over this weekend and helped me paint the kitchen.  Besides fixing up the walls a little, I've been stripping paint from some of the woodwork.  You can see a little bit of that in the pictures, but I'll reserve that process for its own post when I'm done.

Here's the kitchen when I bought the house:

The walls don't actually curve, that's a combination of three photos taken from the same angle across the kitchen

See that wallpaper border up and on the right?  It's held up with GORILLA GLUE!!!

I tore that sucker down.

I don't think you need pictures of my primer, but you can check out the snazzy paint I (finally) picked out, it's Eddie Bauer/Valspar Travertine and I chose it after painting my friend's living room with the same color, and then I plan on using Benjamin Moore Icicle for the trim and cabinets.

After!

Of course the Travertine isn't nearly that brown, this is a picture of it in my kitchen, with a sample of the Icicle:

By now it probably looks like I have no idea where I'm going with all this, but trust me, there is a method to my madness.  I'll share a few inspiration pictures before I head off to bed for the night:

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(If you have the source for this one, please share!) 

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Long time no blog!

Contrary to what my blog makes it look like, I HAVE been doing some work.  Mainly on the kitchen and a little bit tackling the jungle in my backyard.

The area in the corner of the kitchen where the old furnace was went from this:

 

to this:

First off, in the kitchen, I tore down a bunch of crumbling plaster over the old furnace chimney.

A lot of people thought I should finish exposing the brick and seal it.  I didn't like the look in my kitchen,  as opposed to say, a modern loft or townhouse in the city.  It just didn't work for what I want to do here.

So I bought some small pieces of drywall.  Home Depot sells them in manageable 3'x3' (I think?) squares so I didn't have to cut down a full-sized sheet of drywall.

I tried several methods of measuring the space that stuck out where I couldn't break up the concrete around the vent hole into the chimney.  I tried lipstick, I tried brown paper.. in the end I just kind of guessed at it and kept cutting it back 'til it fit.

 


Before I put up the drywall, I filled the space around the old pipe with spray foam insulation and primed EVERYTHING with an oil-based primer.

after that I smoothed everything as much as I could with patching compound and decided that eventually, I'm just going to frame the whole thing in with drywall.

House of Blues

I've been convinced not to paint my entire house the same shade of blue, but that didn't stop me from painting two rooms different shades of blue!

It's hard to tell here, but this color is actually Valspar "Novella Blue"

In several of the pictures, it came out looking very aqua-like

The view from the primed dining room..

See what I mean about aqua??  The dining room color is pretty accurate, though.  It's Valspar Blue Mist:

And I don't know if you've noticed yet.. but that couch should look very, very familiar.

Yup, it's THAT couch.  I bought it.  And not even off of Craigslist!  The table is from Craigslist though, formerly of Ikea.

scraping is done!

This was before:

If you don't understand why I went through the trouble to remove the paint from the walls and not just the visible wallpaper, consider that in some places, the walls looked like this:

And, given a little tug, like this:

We found what looks like at least 4 different wallpapers, and decades of paint on top.  I decided it was all coming down for a fresh start.

And now, I am down to bare plaster.  You can see samples for paint colors I'm thinking of over the fireplace.  After I refinish the floors, I will prime and paint.