Kitchen is done... finally

The kitchen is done, finally.  Man oh mighty that was a tough job.  I started out on one side of the kitchen on a small wall.  The one wall I choose to start on the former owner thankfully painted before they put up the wall paper.  But that is where the thankfulness stopped.

None of the other walls where painted before putting up the wallpaper.  Seriously. None of them.  And the stuff was put up everywhere.  On the back of every shelf outside a cabinet.  Above the cabinets.  Along every edge.  Everywhere.  Plus the stuff is textured so I can’t just paint over it without the flower overlay on top of the plaid to show through.  (Yes, I tried on a small spot, but no luck.)

Then, when I took down the blinds to paint in the breakfast nook (because they even wallpapered that horrible stuff on the ceiling of the breakfast nook) I found that the screws holding up the blinds where also holding up the entire back side of drywall on the ceiling.  (Grrrr)

Four Coats of One-Coat Paint

So, here is what happened to fix it.  First thing to do was to secure the ceiling in place so it doesn’t come down.  The entire room and all of the cabinets and floor got covered in plastic because this is going to be a mess.  Every inch of wall has to be covered and scraped in drywall mud to fill in the texture.  The mud goes on super thin, so not too worried about cracking.  However, it took me three times of doing the process to get everything super smooth to my satisfaction.  This means that every inch of wall had to be mud-ed, dried, sanded, wiped down to get rid of the drywall dust, and then done again two more times.  All this just to hide the texture and make sure it lasts.

Six Coats of One-Coat Paint

Then everything had to be painted.  The wallpaper was so loud that it took six, yes, that’s right, six, coats of one-coat paint to cover it up so it doesn’t show through anymore. 

To get the plastic off, a knife had to be used to cut away the dried paint because this room took so long to do.  Cleaned everything up and called it a done.

Now on to the next project.