The major kitchen task of painting (most of) the walls is now finito. It's so much more refreshing to look at an entirely painted wall rather than random swatches and samples stuck everywhere...
So, from square one:
I had a messy, messy kitchen. But of course, in line with the way I usually do things, I didn't do the practical thing first, which was clean. Instead, I just moved things around as I went along, including dishes, plants, electrical cords and then of course all the big furniture and wall hangings.
All of the switch covers I took out to my handy ventilated screen porch and threw them on the floor to put a fresh coat of spray paint on them and make them all the same white, and clean them up a little.
Always good to keep all the screws together in one place. In my case, I was basically freshening up white switch plates anyway, so I didn't have to worry about the color of the screws, which normally come with the heads painted the color of the plate. Just something to keep in mind in case the need to spray paint switch plates in any other color comes alone... ;)
It really wasn't too bad, except that it looked like the kitchen had been through an earthquake or two.
I went through and pulled off all the outlet and switch covers, and also removed the metal cover of the ventilation fan that sits on the wall above the stove. (Ew. It needed to be cleaned anyway.)
I put the first coat on in one evening, then waited for it to dry before doing the second coat the following evening. After the first night it looked something like this (from the hallway):
Messy. !!
But then I put the second coat on last night, and cleaned up quite a bit -- I moved that bulky cabinet thing into the living room so the hallway has opened up quite a bit.
My kitchen actually echoes now. Might have to work on putting in a textile or two!
This kitchen has been a work in progress since I moved in. The apartment was built in the 1960s sometime, and all of the cabinet work and everything was built then, and had been mostly unchanged... until KATE CAME ALONG, that is.
Just for before/after sake, here are a few photos of what the place looked like before I moved in, in much its original state. Good ol' 1960s-style wood stain and all (and check out how there are a million cabinet doors!!)...
(with sister!)
This wall is not original to the apartment. It used to be open to allow for a bit more kitchen counter space that L'ed around, and then to a large living room in the front that looked down onto the main street. The wall was put in to provide a meeting area and storage space in the front for the coffee shop.
Down the hall.
Sooo... for your viewing pleasure....
THE MIDDLE STAGES (before I even painted the cabinets):
... and AFTER (today! hooray!):
The plan is to turn the door next to the fridge into a giant chalkboard.
The hallway is in some serious need of wall decoration, but I'm so happy with the way the color brightened it up.
I really gotta do something about the way everything is displayed on top of the cabinets, or what is displayed there, but someday I'll figure it out. And the "backsplash" (although there isn't really one) needs some decoration desperately!
Some kitsch for my kitch!
The view from the living room. I was under strict orders not to, under any circumstances, repaint the green cabinet (which is fine, because I would never want to!) -- it is full of weird old kitschy stuff, cookbooks, and baking ingredients. And note the one mismatched kitchen chair! The three red ones were found on the curb in Madison, WI.
And that's the whole of the painting saga in the kitchen. It's the second time I put a coat of paint in here... and probably the last.
Whew!
The best part will be figuring out what the do with all this clear, bright wall space now. ;)
My bathroom never gets any decorating attention. It's a pretty nice bathroom, though, and there's a lot of space that I've never utilized well. It's actually kind of astounding that I haven't put any shelves in there since I've lived in this apartment!
But I have this wall:
The necessary "before" picture. There's a photo of London hanging under the bank of lights, and then just hang something for the sake of hanging something, I put up a test sheet for some stencils I sprayed last year sometime. But there's no point to them there. They had to come down.
The other day, I ran across one of those sets of floating boxes that you can find at pretty much every big box store, except that these ones were only $5 for all three and someone had taken the time to put little foam padding on the back so that they don't scrape the wall. Sold!
Thing is, why do these shelves always come in black? It's like black is the obligatory "cool" color. Maybe because it's so neutral, it's the go-to for these shelves. But I didn't want that out-of-the-box look, so I dug around in my box of spray paint and found a lovely interior-exterior Krylon paint in a light olive/celery color. I decided that was EXACTLY what these shelves needed!
I gripe and gripe about my screen porch floor not being finished. It's plywood currently, which I cover up with rugs of various designs. Thing is, a screen porch is perfectly ventilated and with an unfinished floor, I didn't have to worry about putting a tarp down. Heeeee! ;)
Each side took about 10 minutes to dry, so it was a paint-wait-paint-wait sort of thing, but it was well worth it.
Materials:
Shelves to paint
Spray paint in color of choice
Tape measure
Nails
Hammer
A level, if you're not confident in your eyeballing prowess
Spackle and scraper (if you mess up, like me!)
So, patience is the biggest thing here: waiting for the paint to dry thoroughly on each side is critical, because if you turn it and it's not dry, depending on the paint it might run or drip, or more annoying, dirt will stick to it or it might become textured in an unappealing way. Make sure to cover the paint evenly and if it looks like it's starting to drip, don't keep adding. Stop, wait for it to dry, then go over with another coat. This will keep it looking smooth. These shelves only needed one coat; it didn't take much on something so small.
Then, for hanging, I laid them out on the floor to see if I could come up with an arrangement I liked. And as you'll see, I came up with one where the medium-sized box was turned to a diamond rather than a straight-on square:
Cute, but not very practical. Sooo. I took that down and tried again. But then I ended up with this mess, because I can be a little careless sometimes:
This is where the spackle comes in. Luckily, the paint on this wall is white, so spackle doesn't show up well anyway. But I do have leftover paint from these walls, so I'll go back and touch it up if it really needs it. I got that awesome spackle that comes pink when it's wet and then it turns white as it dries. Amazing stuff!
The final product looks like this:
I realize the menagerie of items is pretty eclectic. It occurred to me as I was putting things on the shelves that I just don't own very many decorative trinkety things. Maybe some day I will manage to amass enough of some kind of collection that I can display like items here. Until then, my eclectic mix will do!
Also, for the heck of it, I found a new shower curtain the other day that I like loads better than the one I had before (which was bought on the cheap just so I could have one, period). But I can't say I ever totally warmed to it, even though it's not super ugly. Just not right:
The color scheme in this bathroom is starting to take shape, accidentally and thankfully, though it is a challenge to have to work around the yellow tile. The tile has little clouds of orange in it, so when combined with the wrong hues, makes it look dingy. It's not. It just needs some good matchy-matchy. I think this works, so it's a good start:
Next on the bathroom list: a curtain to replace the one pair of blinds in the entire apartment, and the one pair of blinds my cat has created a climbing-hole through. They look terrible. Time to fix!
And today begins kitchen painting, officially! Hurrah!
Another lovely, lovely summer day. So happy to see the sun again.
Since I live on my own and have to cook for one person (challenging, I find, because there's a lot of potential waste if one isn't careful), going to a farmer's market is a challenge in self-control. Because I WANT EVERYTHING. And considering it's still early in the season and there isn't a gigantic selection of produce yet, there's still enough to be tempting (too tempting) for one person alone.
So I tend to stick to the fruits, things that can be eaten quickly (preferably by the handful) so that they don't spoil... and fruit doesn't necessarily have to have a meal planned for it. Sure, I really wanted garlic scapes, but I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head that in the next week I would REALLY NEED garlic scapes for. ;) That's the beauty of the market, though; if I figure something out, they will likely be there next Saturday.
Although the state's second largest farmer's market is only a fifteen minute drive from home, I opted to head to the one here in town, which has a steadily growing selection of things to choose from. There are a few crafts and plant vendors also, but my mom orders pasture-raised beef (delicious!) from a farmer there, there are a few Hmong family booths with a wide variety of whatever is in season (along with a Hmong spring roll/egg roll stand that I can't avoid no matter how hard I try). I think maybe my most exciting discovery was an Amish bakery from which I bought the. most. AMAZING seven-grain honey bread. I seriously just ate about half of it. Plain. So great. I know where I'm getting my bread from now on -- made in little loaves just perfect for a singlette like me!
After the market, I went to the home improvement store and bought paint for the kitchen (!!!), and also found at a local thrift shop some shelves that I am revamping (photos to come, of course). While I intended to start painting the kitchen, it seems as though my bathroom suddenly became the center of redecorating attention. So we'll see where that leads me...
The apartment I'm in now is the first place I've had the opportunity to really dig in and decorate how I want. That's the benefit of my landlord being my sister! ;) But really, it's been and continues to be a huge challenge. My tastes are always changing, and I've also learned over the last couple years that there is often a huge difference between what I think looks awesome in a spread in some glossy architecture magazine, and what I actually feel comfortable living with. Sometimes they are polar opposites, and I've ended up aiming for, say, some stark, minimal contemporary space and then finding that I want to transform it into something cushy and cluttered and comfortable. It's hard. But it's also fun. So...
Where to begin? My kitchen is the weirdest kitchen there is. And right now, I'm not even going to skirt the truth, which is very simply that it is an utter disaster. It's a mess. It kind of looks just a little bit like a bomb went off in the middle of it. Sometimes I'm in awe at the amount of dishes one person can a) own, and b) pile up. It's scary. It's beautiful when they're all clean and put away. But let's be honest, how often is that?
My kitchen functions as the central room and also the main thoroughfare. It connects with a wide-open door to the living room, another door to the bedroom, and the short hall that leads to the bathroom and out to the back screen porch. It's a pretty big kitchen for an apartment, so there are no complaints there. My small apartment-size fridge fits in a custom-made nook so it doesn't stick out into the room and take up space. There's enough room for a good size dining table in the middle. There is so much cabinet space that I'm sometimes overwhelmed, but it serves as all-purpose storage since it's a little hard to come by in general. But I still think it's a weird kitchen.
This is what it looked like when I had obviously cleaned a TON, and before I painted the cabinets red:
I painted the kitchen cabinets a stark, crazed red last winter. At first, I liked it. Anything was better than the 60s-era yellowish thing they had going on; their original style. Now that I look at pictures, though, they weren't so bad. I was just sick of them more than anything. They're nice cabinets, really, but man, there were a lot of them. When I first moved in, I took off all the tiny cabinet doors up on the top-top and turned all that space into open display space where my sudden collection of jadeite now sits, among other things.
I painted a giant rendition of Joost Schmidt's Bauhaus poster on one wall to go with the red-is-rad theme:
Red, black, and white were apparently my go-to's, but let me be the first to admit that an entire kitchen in red and black is not exactly inviting. Not if done incorrectly, and I did it incorrectly. Mostly because red is an exciting, energetic, kind of nervous color, and I did almost nothing to calm it the heck down. And partly because I had a gigantic seafoam-green metal cabinet scrounged from an old hospital on the Bauhaus wall. And also because there is very little natural light that enters this room -- one north-facing window, and it just started feeling a little bit... angular. And hodge-podge, and not in a good, harmonious way.
I like comfortable. I have a lot of hard-edged furniture. My floors are terrazzo; they are hard and grey-beige and not very cute. I needed to soften things up. So the first step was to head to the home store and get some paint samples. And hooray! It was easy! My kitchen walls are about to be transformed to a hue called "Aqua Breeze," which is the bottom-most swatch on this wall. I've used up almost the entire sample can already.
Can't wait to show the finished walls! And then, of course, it's on to the decorating...
