So let's get it done! We're completing jobs so fast around here that I don't even have time to blog about it, so get used to some picture-heavy but light-on-the-words posts coming your way!!!
First giant job on the list? Painting the kitchen cabinets.
We have patched together this kitchen with cabinetry from four different places, plus built some ourselves, and none of it matches. I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years dithering over what colour to paint things. The last time I talked about it, I had pretty much decided to go with a dark grey on the lower cabinets and a light white-ish colour on the upper cabinets and open shelves (see here).
But after all of that thinking and playing around with photo editing software to see what it would look like... I changed my mind.
We're going to keep things simple, and go with a very pale off-white-ish grey. Done. Decided. Let's just get it done already!!!!
So Tom removed all of the cabinet doors, carefully marking where they belong in the spot where all the hinges go (so that it wouldn't get painted over)...
Leaving our kitchen looking like this.
A door-less pantry is never a good look.
And then he cut down some skirting board pieces to size so that they could fit around the base of all of the cabinets and be our kickboards...
I think he did a great job on the corners. Particularly since when we built the little plinths for all of our lower cabinets to sit on, we did it with my father's old circular saw with a completely blunt blade that resulted in some pretty crazy discrepancies in height.
But then our issue was where we could possibly lie out all of our cabinet doors and drawer fronts that with enough space to paint them!
Enter our double-car-sized shed.
OK, at the moment it doesn't look like there's much room in there to lie out about 20 square metres of cabinet doors, but it has potential.
And since we know that the shed is going to have to go in the future anyway in order to prepare for our one-day townhouse construction in the backyard, we decided that it was high time we gave the shed a detox.
Enter our single-car-sized garage.
We decided to move everything. Absolutely everything from the shed into the little single-car garage. So we splurged and bought ourselves some on-special steel shelving from Bunnings, and began the process of moving everything in, bit by bit.
I had the time of my life organising things and labeling it all.
And then the real fun began.
We puttied all of the old handle holes...
And then we laid them all out like little soldiers...
And sanded them, front, back, sides, everything.
Until we were left with no more holes, and a perfectly scuffed finish so that the paint would stick.
That kind of process always seems to simple in your head when you're planning a project! But that whole "prepping" stage took us an entire day. Not including the garage moving, either. That was an entire weekend, right there.
Annnnnnyway, guess what came next?
Don't you love how a slightly fuzzy black and white photo manages to romanticise the most tedious and back-breaking process?
As you can see, here I was on the first coat of undercoat. And it was night-time.
But we got it done.
Even the sheets of tin to go above the stove and on the back of the peninsula got the same treatment. Although thankfully they didn't need puttying or sanding!
So after we managed to undercoat both sides of each cabinet door and drawer front, leaving enough time for the first side to dry before flipping them, of course...
We were finally onto our top coat! We knew that we would be going with an enamel (oil-based) paint in a semi-gloss finish for as much durability and wipeability as possible, and I strode into the paint section of Bunnings determined to make a FAST decision on paint colour.
20 minutes later, I had decided. Not super fast, but faster than the 2.5 years leading up to it!
We settled on the same grey that we used on the downstairs walls, Dulux's Dieskau, but at half strength, so that it would only be a little bit grey.
And then we got rollin'.
I really don't like working with oil-based paint. It's sticky, it needs Mineral Turpentine to clean it up, and it takes FOREVER to dry.
We had to wait about 6 hours before the paint was touch dry to flip the cabinets over, and even that was risky. And we had to wait at least 16 hours before re-coating. But the real kicker? After the final coat, it needs SEVEN days to harden! Seven days!!!!! I'm Gen Y, I can't handle that kind of delayed gratification!
But handle it I did. Because all of the pain of waiting and cleaning between coats was still preferable to having cabinets where the paint would chip off with use, as has been our experience painting hard-wearing things with acrylic (water-based) paint.
I also took my enamel paint inside, where there were a few bits of the kitchen that we couldn't separate to paint them outside.
The base of the little wine fridge nook...
The little nooks we built under the kitchen sink cabinet to hold baskets of potatoes and onions...
And the slim little pieces of timber trim on the fronts of each cabinet (you can see them in their un-painted state above in the shot where Tom is measuring the timber) kickboards .
While I stunk out the kitchen with the smell of my paint, Tom persevered in the shed.
And since I'd like you to experience just a small taste of the same delayed-gratification pain that I suffered from, that's all you're getting for the moment! You'll just have to imagine how wonderful all of those kitchen cabinets will look with freshly painted doors and drawers! For a whole week!
Just kidding. I won't torture you that long. See you tomorrow!
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