The never-ending kitchen

We have been working an hour here, an hour there on the house over the last few months to leave me enough time to work on my illustration projects. As such, any project longer than 15 minutes seems to take many weekends to complete. Add to that the fact that our kitchen is unpacked and being used regularly. This will explain why I'm STILL painting the kitchen cabinets. I did veer slightly outside the kitchen to the cabinets that extend into the dining room area. Learning from earlier mistakes, I primed and painted all the the cabinets white first, then I masked off the shelves so that I could paint my favorite teal color, Splashy, on the back and side walls of the cabinet. It worked 98%...there was a little bleed under the tape that I had to touch up. I think I'll try wiping the tape edges with a damp rag next time, since the adhesive activates when wet to form a good painter's tape seal. 

I also primed and painted the non-accent walls in the dining room. These are getting another shade of gray, this time a light warm shade similar to French Gray. It's slightly darker and more neutral than the color that was already on the wall, dark enough to make the top white cabinets pop with contrast, but light enough that the dark blue bottom cabinets also have a lot of contrast. I will carry this color into the kitchen as well if I ever finish removing the wallpaper in that room. That's another project for another month. 

To some degree, it feels silly painting the cabinets when I know we want to remodel the kitchen, but our next major renovation project is the horrible upstairs bathroom. So that puts the kitchen at least a year or two out, and I'd rather have pretty cabinets now and look forward to optimized kitchen design later. Possibly by then we'll be done with the teal and want something entirely different. 

Other minor improvements: framed some artwork to be hung in the dining room when fully completed, installed downstairs hall light, failed at installing the art room overhead light (doh!), bought a rug for the TV area, installed curtains in the art room, cleaned the work area in the garage.

The "dining room" kitchen cabinet complete!

Eric installing the hall light. Two of the screws were too long, so we learned how to trim screws without damaging the threads too much.

The finishing touch

One hops that the light will be more effective when it's dark in the house, since it's not very bright in this photo.

Finished the final teal coat on the new home for the microwave to get it off the countertop. 

Shiny!

We drilled a hole in the side of the cabinet and threaded the cord through the gap between the two cabinets. This is below the cabinet next to the microwave.

The new art curtains are light and airy with a fun pattern--just enough to block the light from directly hitting the laptop on the left table during the day, but still allows nice breezes when the windows are open.

The kitchen has invaded the dining room for the foreseeable future. 

Priming the wall and the cabinets. where the cabinets change height is the demarcation between the kitchen and dining room. You can also see a good shot of the original cream/yellow wall color.

The new wall color. It's creamy and pretty :)