The Kitchen.

Last weekend I awoke at 6am, Saturday. I drove D to Two Medicine (East side, Glacier) and drove home.

I'd been trying to figure out what to do with the kitchen. The evil, dark, gloomy, cave-like, dungeon of a kitchen. I don't have any photos of the kitchen as it was, as D had the only camera in the house I can currently get to work, but it sort of looked like the kitchen to the right. The other problem - we have so much kitchen stuff, fun, happy kitchen stuff, that we had to have a lot of stuff sitting out. On the counter, on top of the cupboards, everywhere. And because the horrible dark, dungeon cupboards were this horrible medium to dark streaked wood laminate, it created a very busy looking kitchen. We had to put a warning sign up as epileptics were likely to have seizures upon entry.

We had bought a couple gallons of paint from, essentially, a Home Improvement thrift store (amazing) for really cheap to cover up the creepy 70's childrens wallpaper in the room we were going to use as our bedroom. And the owner of our new house had a couple of gallons of paint in the basement. When I returned from driving D I started in on the sink full of dirty dishes, giving me time to dwell on everything that was wrong with our kitchen... dishes are good for stewing. And it occured to me that what I needed to do in the next 28 hours before I had to go fetch D - was repaint the entire kitchen.

The walls. The cabinets. Heck I considered painting the countertops (only for .2 seconds, but still).

So I hopped downstairs and pulled out all the paint in the house and started looking around. Well, actually, I pulled everything out of, down from, and off of, the cabinets first. The Bike Box (the downstairs bedroom that serves as bike storage) became the kitchen overflow room (told you we have a lot of kitchen stuff). Then I removed all the cabinet fronts and drawers, pulled off the hardware, and sat down on the floor of the now empty kitchen to figure out step two.

There was an almost full gallon of the most ridiculous green paint I'd ever seen, presumably because our landlord had considered painting something that color. As a favor to her, and anyone else who ever occupies our house, and really, to the world at large, I dumped a bunch of off-white paint of a slightly pinkish/peachish persuasion into the green. It made a previously fluorescent and acidic green, into a very acceptable vibrant moss color. And that's what ended up on the walls.

I then pulled over another can of paint already in residence in the house, pleased that the streaks down the side of the can looked like a promising off-white in the yellow realm, which would work well with the counter tops. Popped the top to find an inch of light blue liquid on top, grabbed a stirring stick and hit a very hard, sticky layer of paint. There was no stirring. Absolutely nothing was moving in the bottom of that paint can. The Off-white color that I'd mixed with the green was much too peachish, and looked atrocious against the yellow counters. So I grabbed my purse and headed for Josey. With $12 worth of paint and some more painter's tape in my hand I was back at the house painting cabinets.

Sunday involved second coats for most things and a third coat for some of the larger cabinet doors where I had lost my patience and not done the most even and effecient job the first time :)

I didn't quite manage to get all the painting done by the time I picked D up, and that was even with the extra hour from Daylight Savings Time :( This is what he saw when he got home... note the refrigerator pulled away from the wall and covering most of the entry way into the kitchen.

But the painting was done on Monday, and I moved the last few things back into the kitchen today.

I was a little worried about the hardware, but in the end, I wasn't going to pay for new stuff myself, and D says he actually likes it... hmm.

Three notes -

- No I don't approve of painting wood. This was horrible wood laminate over pressed wood product, so I felt no qualms.

- No I didn't get permission from our landlord. The property management company gave me a pretty unconcerned answer when I asked about painting walls, so I decided to run with it.

I believe they said "as long as it looks better than it did before". Check.

- The older I get the less I cherish my perfectionistic tendencies. I worry this is the truist sign of cynicism I have yet shown. Though D may argue.