I Love Lamp: What If We Just Painted It? The Kitchen Edition
"What if we just painted it?" said me and Steven ten million times since we've moved here.
Paint. Porch paint in particular. That and barn wood have been our absolute favorite go-to DIY tools since moving up here. Because sometimes you don't have the time and/or the cash to do much more than a quick, surface layer re-do of a space. From our living room--
to our bedroom--
90% of the work has been PAINT!
Which brings me to the kitchen.
Oh, the kitchen. As I've mentioned before, it was once the industrial kitchen for when the first floor of this house was the restaurant for the Schwarzeneggers's Sunshine Valley House. Meaning yes it's huge, but it's also kind of falling apart and totally unheated and all in all just a liiiiittle bizarre. And scary. Like from a designer's point of view, I think it morally offends my mom that a place like this even EXISTS in the world.
We made a stab at it last year-- threw some white paint up and some plastic rugs down, hung some wire baskets and even a barn door! And it was a nice improvement. See, here's when we moved in:
And here's pretty much what it looks like now:
But this is ALSO right now:
Not so hot. Well, especially not with the the fluorescent lights on which we normally don't have buzzing, but I wanted to give you the full effect of that oh so wonderful and probably many decades old linoleum floor.
Basically we've been torn about what the most sensible next step for this space is. Because while we'd love to do a MAJOR renovation of it, that's just not in the cards right now. But there's also a limited amount of changes we can make between now and whenever that will be, because once you pull at one piece you realize it's attached to another-- and I mean this quite literally. Like the cabinet over the sink is literally a part of the ceiling so who knows what would happen if we tired to take that down. From conversations with the pervious owners, this seemed to be their conundrum too so at least we haven't been the only ones kinda stumped by this room.
SO. What does that leave us with? You said it! PAINT!
I'd been trying to be orderly about this-- saying we'd paint the ceiling first, then the walls, then floor etc. But today we had the grey porch paint out since we were painting the floor of the hotel's laundry room (new boiler = time for a real cleaning and painting) and well, it just kind of happened.
"It" being "the first coat in part of the kitchen" but already I'm IN LOVE. And it was high stakes-- I sacrificed making brownies tonight to test this corner!
We're gonna let it sit overnight and see how it does. Scuff it up a bit, make sure it wears well. And then hit the second scariest corner of the kitchen:
But check that out! Look at the stripe of grey and how it looks approximately 3,000 times better than whatever else we're working with over on the right? I mean, our hodge podge storage solutions aren't doing us any favors either, but I've also got some plans for that...
Anyway, I'm psyched! About porch paint!
The things that thrill you now that would disappoint your little kid self to hear... haha!
(What is I Love Lamp? This is I Love Lamp.)