Painting the Kitchen

The end of June will be 10 years that I closed on my house. I cannot believe I have lived here for 10 years all ready. I lived in the house for over 6 years before I really started caring how it looked or did many updates to it. That is mostly in part due to lack of money but also I just didn't know what I wanted, how to do it and also I had someone else there who didn't do much around the house to help or motivate me to want to improve it.

2011 is when I finally had the freedom to start making the house the way I wanted it. The first thing that I did was paint my kitchen. This is long before my blogging days and before I really did much in regards to do it yourself so the pictures I have aren't great. They were taken with a poor quality Blackberry phone camera and not the best lighting or angles. I also didn't take good before photos so I'm going to try to look through old party photos to show what the kitchen looked like.

I knew I wanted a good red so I went to Home Depot and bought two samples. I painted squares on one part of the wall to try to figure out what red I wanted. It was my first time painting with a dark color. The best advice I can give is after the first coat, don't freak out with how uneven it looks. The second coat makes it look much better and evens it all out.

I have also learned to take your time and be very careful with taping off and going around the trim. Since this was one of my first projects I did NOT take my time and here it is 4 years later and I still look around and see spots I need to touch up. Red that bled through the tape, a spot on the ceiling or places where the tape wasn't totally straight. When you're doing such a dark color you're able to notice EVERYTHING.

Here are some before photos. This first one is from a party but it shows how there also once was wallpaper up as well.

Here is where I was trying out the two different reds. I opted for Behr Gardenia. I used their Paint and Primer in one paint. 

 

You can see I did tape off a lot but I still had a lot of touch ups to do. 

These are just the beginning photos of my kitchen redo. It has taken years and is still currently in progress. The red against the cabinets is not a look that I like.

 

So that is my updated kitchen painting photos. This was done in 2011 as I mentioned. The reason I decided to do this blog today was the "On this Day" thing on Facebook showed these photos and I figured even though it's an old project it's worth blogging about, especially since it was the first thing I really did.

I will try to do another one soon with the cabinets. That was the next thing I did in the kitchen. It really made the red look better.