Along Came A Kitchen

Hello all! Yes, I know, this is the first posting in a very long time! What can I say, the holidays slowed me down quite a bit! ;) In any case, the new year has spurred me on to get my kitchen going. I believe my last post was with getting the beam in place under the kitchen and then getting most of the plywood laid down on the floor. Since then, things have moved slowly, lol, at least until this week. This week saw us getting the lauan up on the kitchen walls, and even getting them primed already!

So goodbye ugly yellow paneling and ugly yellow clapboard walls! It appears this kitchen has always been yellow (except for however many years the wallpaper was the main feature, and who knows, it may have been yellow too once upon a time!), but I'm definitely going to change that history! I'm leaning towards a khaki green or perhaps even a light green. But I'm not ruling out a darker green or even a brown at this point, although they're pretty low on the possibility poll.

So, in between getting the lauan up and primed and the other stuff I've done, I now have a medicine chest in the bathroom:

And we also put up the cabinet I'd gotten at the Salvation Army. It now graces the wall above the toilet, and looks great (I painted it with an enameled brilliant white) in place!

Finally a little bit of storage in there!

Anyway, back to the kitchen. I have samples of the colors I'm considering doing for the kitchen, so I hung them up on the casings of the doorways going into the bathroom and the living room. Not sure how well the colors are going to look in the pictures, but you can probably at least see the variety and type I'm going for. The kitchen receives so little natural light that I'll most likely go with a lighter shade just to brighten things up in there a bit.

I spent some time cleaning off all that, well, crap I had on the countertop. I threw a good deal of it away, since it was just stuff that I was saving that had come out of the house that I really had no need for, like the round glass globe that came off the ceiling light in the bathroom and the old johnny ring from the toilet. I debated trying to sell the globe in my booth at Marketplace, but it was cheap and ugly, so I just tossed it as junk. So the kitchen started looking somewhat better:

There's still that horribly ugly yellow overhang at this point. Fortunately, when I was priming the cabinets today, I "accidentally" primed the overhang as well. Oops! Although I noticed later that I missed the end piece (the piece in the above pic that's to the left of the oven). Well, I'll just have to "accidentally" get it tomorrow when I finish priming the cabinets! Today, I got the wall cabinets to the right of the sink:

As well, I primed the facing of some of the cabinets, both base and wall, to the left of the sink as well. I still need to clear the contact paper from the wall shelves on the left of the sink before I prime them, and of course gotta get that overhang end. Oh, and you'll notice the lauan just to the left of the oven hasn't been primed either. That's because I'm not sure if it's going to work or not. I put it up yesterday, but I don't think it's quite wide enough. I'll have to get my expert to take a look if he's able to be here Sunday (since Sunday is supposed to be quite a nasty day, he may not be able to make it) and let me know if it's going to be acceptable or if I'll need to get another piece of lauan to put up there.

Oh, and I nearly forgot that I spent a good deal of time priming the ceiling today too! No pics of it (couldn't really tell a whole lot of difference, except for the water stains around the central h&a vent), but that was quite the adventure, at least when I removed the vent cover so I could prime the stains better. I took the cover off, after scraping off some paint from the screw slot, and was attacked! LOL, or I thought I was being attacked anyway. A hunk of dried mud, a little bigger than a golf ball, hit me smack in the middle of the chest and bounced to the floor! When I examined it, I found it was a dirt daubers' (or mud daubers') nest! Only one of the chambers had opened, so I guess the other chambers contain the remains of some dead dauber young! I didn't even think to photograph it, but it's out on the porch, so maybe I'll do that tomorrow lol.

I can't wait to get started on the countertop. We're going to put backerboard directly on top of the formica that's currently there, and then put tile on top of that. It's going to raise the counter by approximately an inch, so we're going to have to raise the sink and the stovetop that same amount. I'm almost reluctant to hide the formica, since it's so retro, but I think the tile will look tons better!

  Oh, on a side note, while I was removing the contact paper from the cabinets to the right of the sink, I discovered there were two layers of it: the topmost layer is of geese (from when that was popular, and I'm so glad it no longer is), while the layer under that was some ugly flowers that appeared to be from the '70's. However, I found another layer in the cabinets on the left side; a paisley pattern that I assume to have been from the late '60's; I removed a small piece and photographed it on my computer desk:

Anyway, tomorrow is a new day, one I'm looking forward to tackling!