Painting

It seems as winter months near, I'm always stuck painting. No, not artistic painting... painting the house.

This weekend, my wife said she wanted to change the blinds in our kitchen windows. OK. So we went to Home Depot and purchased several blinds and I installed them. Not bad. The problem though was the new blinds made the old wallpaper in our kitchen look really bad. That old wallpaper had been on the walls since we purchased the house many years ago.

Well, the kitchen isn't all that large, so we decided to go ahead and strip off the wallpaper and paint. We figured it shouldn't take us too long. Wrong! After steaming off the old wallpaper, we found that the walls were originally painted yellow! And it was different shades of yellow on the various walls too! I have never seen anything like it.

Well, it took a couple of coats of paint to hide that awful yellow, which of course took longer than we thought. So after finishing the walls by 1 AM, I still had to paint the back door of the kitchen... which I saved until today.

We used semi-gloss enamel paint for the door and of course, that takes longer to dry than standard latex paint. The original door color was an awful beige color which neither of us liked and so we decided to paint the door a "Vanilla" white. Well, it requires several coats as well to cover the beige color and enamel paint is rather "slick" too, making it harder to roll on. Brushes just make a visible "brush stroke" and so that had to be avoided.

So yes, painting always takes longer than you think. But one thing is for sure, had we tried to plan for this "upgrade" to our home, it probably would never had gotten done. An impromptu upgrade seems to be the best way to get it done. But boy, does it sure take a lot longer than you think!