Progress in the Kitchen

I have finished painting the kitchen walls. I actually finished them a few weeks ago but didn't get around to posting about it as I had a grand plan that the cupboards and the brickwork would also be finished and I could show them all at once. The weather has been so lovely that all indoor decorating has ceased in favour of the outdoor kind; so the cupboards and bricks are just going to have to wait. I learnt along time ago of the folly of failing to test paint on walls BEFORE you paint the entire room, so I tested nine different colours (8 blue and 1 green). The coffee colour was going to be for the cupboards but we since decided to paint them all white.


Our kitchen was yellow. I have nothing against yellow kitchens. The kitchen in one of our previous homes was yellow and it makes for a bright and happy room but my taste has changed due to excess exposure to too many 'Country Living' and 'Country Homes' magazines, so blue it is.

I took me three days to paint the walls as there are an awful lot of corners in our kitchen and I couldn't reach above the cupboards so my husband painted them for me. It is actually quite ridiculous that it took so long to paint as there isn't that much wall space in the kitchen but the cutting-in took forever.

In the end we settled on Dulux 'First Dawn' and we are both very pleased with the results. It has freshened up the room so much.

We are going to get professionals to paint the kitchen cupboards. Our kitchen is solid wood and still in quite good condition. It does need a little TLC here and there so we are going to spruce it up rather than replacing it. So not only do we save thousands of pounds but also avoid the stress of all those workmen in the house for weeks on end. A friends parents have just done something similar to their kitchen and the painters took the cupboard doors and drawers away to paint them and only had to be there to paint the trim. If their quote is reasonable we will go ahead with that. I hate using enamel paint. I can never seem to get a nice finish with it and as this is the room we use the most I would have to look at my botched painting effort quite alot so I think paying professionals is a good option.

There are two large wood clad beams on our kitchen ceiling. We are going to paint both them and the exposed brickwork white as the red stained beams and the red bricks are a little overpowering. Then the last thing we need to do it get rid of the mural tiles on the splash backs and it will be like a new kitchen.