And I’m Still Painting the Damn Kitchen

I’ve been complaining about this job since April, but sooner or later I need to put it to bed. And this year I’m a Beer Tour host again. This year it’s November 4. Time to start tidying up? Nah, let’s start a project.

(Look how cute the door prize baskets are though! If you want to come, event description and tickets available here.)

So what’s going on here? Well, I expanded the scope of the kitchen from just the doors to all of it, which now includes painting the inside of that cabinet that faces the living room. But first I took the extra trim left over from the top of the paneled wall, the little feather-edged piece that’s mitered back on either side of the door frame…

Off on a tangent, let’s remember that the door casing used to jut into stairway space and I designed the paneling like this very specifically to bring back that unbroken diagonal line. And when you have a very specific idea that you’re hiring someone else to do, draw it! When you tell your ideas to contractors, they hear THEIR ideas, but a drawing gets you what you want.

And some extra stop molding ripped down to look like that. I nailed this onto the cabinet shelves to make plate rails.

Then I painted it with Insl-X Stix Bonding Primer that my dad had left over from another job. And when I Googled that to verify the spelling I saw how expensive it is. Thanks, Dad! This stuff isn’t that much fun to work with. It has the consistency of pudding. But it allows me to paint over the cheap melamine veneered particle board cabinets that I got at a certain Swedish flat-pack furniture store.

Then there’s the non-linear progress. Remember how in early September I got the back sides of all the base cabinet doors painted? I re-hung these glass doors and to my horror, one of them didn’t close right. But my dad has a tool that is my new best friend: a belt sander that mounts to a fence.

I marked out how much to take off with painters tape to make the 2 doors line up with each other, took it outside, and ground it down. Now at least these 2 doors could fool you into thinking they were made well. I just need to paint the top again.

Then there was the small matter of the side panels. They jut out beyond the cabinet frames to make the doors look inset. One of them though had swirly saw marks in it. I tried the best I could to grind them down with a pad sander but it seemed like they just wouldn’t go away. So I troweled a thin layer of spackle onto the edge and problem solved! Solved so well in fact that it made the others look bad. So, the ones that are already painted are now getting the treatment.

Anyways, we’ve got a process here. A process that seems to be moving forward. After months of being demoralized by a seemingly endless parade of defects, I just might have found them all. Well, not all. If I want to get ALL I’ll have to remake a door or 2. But at least now they will exist and they will be installed and the paint will be in good condition.

Then I brought up the paneling. I’m painting that, too, and the basement stairway door. There’s a thermostat that goes on the paneling. I don’t need to turn the heat on yet but when I do, I want to install it onto PAINTED paneling so I never have to take it down again. Plus, the paneling runs straight into the big interior arch, which runs straight into the cabinets on one side. Best to just paint all of it. I’ll sigh when I think about it, but when I finish an area, I say, “Oo, shiny!”

I think it’ll be done and clean in time. Do you?