And Now We Redid the Kitchen

After having the porch done, we decided to redo the kitchen as well. We had our court date for Byron's adoption and many people were coming for that. It was a toss up between doing the stairs to the kids' bedrooms, or the kitchen floor. Our kitchen floor was a mess and Chris thought it would be nice to have it fixed up before they got here. Dumb me, I conceded that it was a good idea and we began work that night. We had 3 weeks to get all of it done.

The Before Shots:

Our paint was coming up in many spots and just looking generally bad.

I had put a lot of work into the floor less then 4 years ago (July 15, 2005, to be exact-I had dated the floor the day we completed it). All that work, and most people didn't even know it was stenciled being blue on blue.

We had two shelves over our doors-they were blue and the trim yellow

The floor really took a beating here in the doorway between the kitchen and keeping room.

The Process:

Chris got started by removing the silly, fancy legs on the cabinets. They didn't serve any purpose other than decoration and they were looking awful anyway and got in my way when I needed to sweep or mop. While he was down there, he pulled up a few strips of paint from the floor.

In a lot of places, you just had to get a little start and the paint would peel up in great big strips.

I worked on the area where our kitchen table resided and got a lot of the paint pulled up.

By the end of Saturday night, we had several areas of paint removed. Many spots, though, were tough to get up, but you could tell they weren't attached real well and had to be removed before new paint could be applied.

Our longest strip of paint came from this spot-Chris started it to the left of the door and it went to the trashcan. I am about 5'8" and it was nearly as tall as me.

It was pretty obvious, at this point, having only three weeks to strip the floor, repaint and stencil, plus allow a week of drying time, we needed some help.

No, we didn't really let David use the sander. But, since I had never used a floor sander before, I thought the whole process pretty fascinating. The pads just stuck on the bottom using velcro. Who knew the Velcro could be so versatile?

I'll also admit to some more ignorance. The ENTIRE time, I thought we were using a drum sander. This is not a drum sander.

Getting started.

And working down the kitchen

By Sunday evening, we had the floor just about sanded completely down. Because the boards were not all straight, there were a few spots of paint that we just could not sand off unless we took off a whole lot more wood.

Here is the top of the basement steps. The carpet had come all the way out to the edge of the doorway, but the cat got a hold of it and began to systematically unravel it. Figuring it to be a safety hazard, Chris took off the metal thingy (what is that thing called anyway?) and trimmed off the straggles of carpet and then reset the metal thingy. The cat was quite confounded when she saw what we had done.

Oddly enough, the paint stuck the most by the kitchen sink and stove. I say, oddly enough, because this area gets the most abuse in the form of traffic, spills and dropped articles.

The job was overseen by two cyborgs.

Once we stripped the floor, we painted the trim red. But, since the yellow doors with the red trim lended itself a McDonald's air, we opted to paint the doors, too.

David spent this particular day, talking my ear off. I was painting doors, though, so a little company was welcome.

Once the doors and trim were done, we moved on to the floor.

And the shelves

I spent quite a few hours laying out the border trim

I ran it all around the room

Border close up

It took Chris several nights to get all the inside flower stencils done. He started on this side of the kitchen. Getting this side done first really made it better. It was the biggest side and once done, we were more excited to finish it up.

He then, went through the narrow walkway

And ended up at the stove.

All in all it took us about 2.5 weeks of solid work to get it done. We really like it, though. The stencil is so much easier to see being red on light brown. I'm really glad I didn't have to do the small stencils this time. It was such a tedious, annoying job.