Kitchen Update: The Part Where It Starts to Get… Better?

It’s been 3 weeks since I’ve said anything meaningful about the kitchen, mostly because I haven’t felt like there’s been anything meaningful going on in the kitchen. Do you know why?

Because I effing hate sanding ceilings, apparently. That’s where I got stuck… well, there and with the-painting-of-the-cabinets which is a story unto itself, but let’s start with the ceilings.

Actually… no. Let’s start with feeling like shit about your progress on a project. Because sometimes people say things to me like “I can’t believe how much you get done” (and every variation of that you can think of), and I can tell you I never feel like a bigger fraud then when that comes up. Because, shiiiiit…

Have you seen my house? This is what my life looks like when I’m “getting so much done.”

I was standing in the torn-apart kitchen with my mom and my (new-ish) dude on Sunday night, enjoying a beer after a long day of work, and with no prompting she turns, looks him directly in the eye, and says, “If you’re thinking her kitchen is just a mess because it’s under construction… you’re wrong. It’s going to look like this even when it’s finished.”

I’m still laughing because, 1.) she’s right and I love her for it. And 2.) he knows it and doesn’t care. That’s exactly how I know I’ve got myself surrounded with the right people.

It’s like, “Oh, YES. I get so much done, but none of those things are laundry or dishes or putting my tools away or actually sanding the kitchen ceiling so that I can finish this project and cook like a real effing adult again, but other than that…”

And that story– the sarcastic one– is the thing that plays on repeat in my head when it’s been three weeks and I haven’t made any meaningful progress on a project. Which I try to talk about at the time… I even wrote 1200 words about how much shit I have not gotten done a few weeks ago…

But I can never quite finish those stories. Even though the whole reason I write is to be authentic, when I’m authentically feeling like shit about my progress, it’s actually hard to talk about it.

So I didn’t.

Oh, but now I’m super excited to talk about it, because look!

Actual progress.

I feel like there’s something hypocritical in all that but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, so just know that for three weeks I basically frowned at myself every day until last Wednesday when I finally gave myself the “spend and hour finishing sanding the ceiling, or else…” talk (no idea what “or else” was going to be, but it worked.) So I sanded and even primed part of the ceiling…

Then I primed the rest of it Thursday. I’ve been posting a lot of “in progress” pics to Instagram lately, and I just have to give a big shout-out to the people who encouraged me Thursday when I was exhausted and ready to give up. I did not give up. I got it done, and now we’ve gone from this…

To this…

And that was an epic pain in the ass. But I already love it for a lot of reasons… it’s so much calmer and brighter in here, and that’s just with a coat of primer. (Also I’ve got nothing against pine paneling–obv, I’ve spent a lot of time installing pine ceilings in other houses I owned–but it’s not what I want in here. And I know, I know people have feeeeelings about painting wood, even in houses that don’t belong to them and that they’ll only ever see through pictures on the internet. Which, yes, I find weird, but you do you guys. I’m doing me, and in this case that means painting some shit white and loving it.)

I’m hoping to add some old barn beams eventually… something like this:

The ceiling needs a couple of coats of paint before I can really start thinking about beams though, and since my neck and shoulders needed a little recovery time, I decided to start on the cabinets instead.

In my head, the cabinets were going to be pretty easy… I have a sprayer that a company sent me for interior work that’s been sitting in a box in my tool room for 2 years, soo I just assumed I’d open it up, use it to spray the cabs and doors a couple of times, and be done with it… right? Right.

Ha.

Until I actually opened it up and realized it’s not meant to give a fine finish on cabinets like a more expensive sprayer would, it’s meant to spray walls and leave a stippled finish like a roller. So I panicked and bought some chickens. I also looked up “the right” type of sprayer to use for cabinets, which, as it turns out, cost about $700. After reading some paint-sprayer horror stories online it occurred to me I might spend an additional $700 and still eff it up, so I decided to call a local paint company and just see what it would cost to have someone else deal with the cabinet doors.

Just for reference, 3 years ago I had someone come out and give me a quote on painting all the wood paneling and the cabinets in the kitchen, and that quote was $5100. Just to have the cabinet doors done was a little less than half that. And I’m at the point in my life where I will happily spend some money on some shit I don’t want to do, but, honestly? Not that much money.

Also, the guy who quoted me on the paint job was an awesome dude and when I clearly had reservations about the price he said, “I know my job is to sell you on this, but you’ve got the right paint and you’re clearly capable, you don’t need us to do this….”

Seriously, I’d have paid him just for the confidence boost.

So, Friday night I decided to test out whether or not I could actually paint the cabinets with a professional-looking finish. It meant cleaning everything with warm, soapy water…

Then, because some of the wood is raised/damaged and I needed to do a legitimate sanding on a few of the doors, clean with a tack-cloth, followed by a sander/deglosser… and then, finally…

I’m using the same shellac-based primer on the cabinet doors as I did on the pine paneling, and then Benjamin Moore’s Advance paint in satin. The finish is actually perfect with a little foam roller. (I’ve used the same paint on some other doors and the mudroom lockers but with a brush, and you can definitely see the brush-strokes, but with the foam roller it’s as good as any sprayed finish I’ve ever seen.)

And, since I was doing the doors, I also did the cabinet bases, in the hopes that I might be able to put some dishes back in them soon. This was before…

And then with primer…

As of this post I just need one more coat of paint on those uppers before I can put stuff back in them. Hopefully that will happen this weekend.

Then it’s just a lot more paint on the cabinets and the doors before we’re ready for counters and moving back to the ceiling. In the meantime I’ve made some exciting progress on the new sink, but that’s a story for another time…

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