Kitchen and Bath Painting extraveganza

We finally decided that it was high time that we got the kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom since it has been over a year since we moved in. Luckily for us, the weather decided to work with us--Memorial day weekend was cool and rainy. So Friday night our hot date was to head on over to Home Depot and pick out some paint chips and check out light fixtures. We took the paint stuff home and decided on yellow for the kitchen and 'barely blue' for the bathroom and to use up the last of the white that we have on the laundry area.

The first order of business was to get all of the furniture out of the kitchen...made for an interesting living room arrangement!

We, of course, thought that this would be a straight forward project that could easily be accomplished in the three day weekend. Wrong-o! When we painted the house before we moved in, we found that one of the walls in the living room had to be totally striped of paint (all the way down to the plaster wall) because it was no longer sticking. Apparently, the kitchen area didn't want to be left out. It took me almost a whole day to get all of the loose paint of the wall--it weighed 10 lbs!

Jeff weighing the bag of paint chips that we swept up from the floor. Unfortunately we couldn't also weigh the stuff that was in my hair or stuck in random parts of my cloths...

The bare-bones wall.

The bathroom also had a spot where the paint wasn't sticking, so we pulled that stuff down as well:

Luckily there wasn't nearly as much to do in here. This is Jeff's leg, he is getting the spots that I couldn't reach because I am a chicken and don't like to be hanging around off of ladders :)

We patched and textured the walls in an attempt to make them appear smoother than they really are. I am glad that we took the time to do that--I think that it makes a big difference, especially when you look closer at the walls. On Monday, we painted the ceilings. That took a little longer than we thought too, but all three rooms got done. The first coat of wall paint didn't get put on the walls until Monday night. I will admit that I was starting to panic because Jeff was supposed to have some friends over Thursday for some Wii playing and pizza and it didn't look like our kitchen table would be in the kitchen by then. Luckily, I got some things done on Tuesday while Jeff was at work and then our friend Jeff Hansen saved the day again. He came over and helped Jeff get paint on the walls in the bathroom and also helped get the paint off of the bathroom drawers (we decided to leave them natural wood because they were so pretty!). We never did get the laundry room painted, that will be a project for another day!

On Wednesday I started putting everything back together--yikes! Jeff had to come home and install the lights in the bathroom. We weren't going to replace them, but then I found some that had built in plugs. Good bye beautiful light fixtures, hello electricity :) We no longer have to run an extension cord from the bedroom! I also finished up the varnishing of the bathroom drawers. Thanks to my Dad who put me on to ironing wood! I think that saved me a bunch of time. Did you know that if there is a ding in a piece of wood furniture you don't have to sand it out? If you get a damp cloth (I used a damp cloth diaper) and run a hot iron over the dings, they will pop out? I had no idea! It was totally awesome! Thursday I cleaned like a maniac. It is amazing how far dust can travel--we put plastic up, but alas, it didn't trap the dust. I can't imagine how yucky things would have been if we hadn't! Luckily, things got back into pretty good order. I am really pleased with the way things turned out.-- I was a little nervous in both rooms as the paint went up, but I love them both. I really want Grandpa to like what we are doing to his house!

The Bathroom: As you can see there is still a hole in the counter top...there is a door that needs a little love before it can go back in. I promise that it will return home sometime soon :)

Lights on:

New pictures:

The Kitchen:

The dining room, looking from the kitchen

Kitchen from the dining room

The dining room from the living room (sorry it is so dark!)

On a side note, some of you will know that we have used yellow and blue in a couple of rooms already. We know that there is a vast rainbow of colors out there, but we had to match the tile that was already in the rooms. Plus, we live in Arizona, everything should be yellow sun and blue skies, right???