Wet Paint

Yay, Saturday! The day when I can paint all day and FINALLY finish the "wet" parts of my kitchen refresh.

Two...or wait, three?...weeks ago I started with this: worn, bland, dirty cabinets, and countertops that were in desperate need of attention.

Photos just don't do it justice.

Armed with my new favorite, whole house white (Valspar's Du Jour), I went to work on the uppers. They were actually quite easy after a good scrubbing, since painting white over off white doesn't take a million coats. For the lower cabinets, I was thinking gray. I'd picked up a little test pot of Valspar's Cathedral Stone from Lowe's, and had liked how it tested in the various lighting of our kitchen. Being the impatient DIYer that I am, and being snowed in, sick, and cheap, I decided to just paint with the test pot. I was very surprised to find that I could paint all my lower cabinets using JUST THAT TINY POT. It was like the Bible story about the widow's jar of oil that always had enough. #tinyhouseforthewin

Here you can see the fresh bright "Du Jour" against the old, dingy "Country White". It's not a huge difference, I admit, but on the other hand, it's like, a huge difference.

The countertops look and feel a billion times better now.

Today, after a week and a half of being halfway done, I finally finished painting and sealed everything to make it easy to wipe down. Huge sigh of relief.

I love the smell of polyurethane in the morning. It smells like success.

I do have a few more tweaks that will involve paint (of course) and hardware, but the big, take-over-the-space painting is done. Holla.

So now comes the fun part--styling.

And cleaning.