June 25, 2013

Kitchen Project

Our new home has an abundance of wall-paper.  I sort of loathe wall-paper.  So it has been a challenge to limit myself to one room at a time to rip it down and clean & paint walls.  Ok - so I actually ripped it down in two rooms but only have finished the painting in one so far.
I simply HAD to do the kitchen first.  The wall-paper wasn't really dreadful or offensive... I just really don't like wall-paper and in the kitchen, the prior owners had taken down the battens on the walls that were wide pine boards and wall-papered OVER the wood!  I was horrified!  Who does that?

Original pantry space when we viewed the house
when we were viewing the house - looking toward the sun-room
 I knew that we needed to paint a lighter color on the walls as the kitchen is on the dark side due to the fact that the cabinets are painted a deep cranberry color.  I like it - I wouldn't have chosen it, but it's fine for now. 
So after some deliberation we opted to use the same wall paint color that we'd had in the kitchen in our old home.  We knew we liked it, knew it would match, no worries.  Except for how on earth we'd get the wall paper residue & paste off the wood wall in the pantry area.
This turned out to be a weeks-long project.  First we had to pull down the wall paper which turned out to actually be two layers plus a wall border.


This left the nasty white paste residue all over the walls.  I tried washing them, used white vinegar & water and a wire scrubby pad.  No dice.  Finally I found this Citristripper stuff and it worked!


Now we needed to figure out a way to replace the batten boards - small strips of wood that go over the wide cracks between the boards. Thankfully I have a very clever husband and he found the right type of wood pieces at the local lumber yard and we were in business.  We had resigned ourselves that we could not re-stain the walls and make them look right, so we opted to paint the entire pantry area to match the walls in the rest of the kitchen.



And Steve installed the new light fixture over the table - black candelabra style which I love!

The kitchen is just about finished now, I still have to finish repainting the molding (crown, chair rail & baseboards) around the rest of the room to cover the cream with fresh white, but it is close enough for now as it is summer and I really don't want to paint when it's above 80 degrees. :-)

June 22, 2013

Cross Posting


Just cross-posting from my sewing blog about my new sewing room.