Here's the wall when we moved in

This year we’ve been beginning a lot of projects around the house. The completion of the bedroom painting is nigh, and we’ve got a few pieces of furniture in the living room. While some projects have hit hiccups or delays, the kitchen has been moving rather quickly. And so we begin the craftier part of this blog.

Our kitchen doesn’t have much to it, but it’s got a bit of depth. The kitchen goes back, flanked by cabinets and appliances, to a dark purple wall that hangs in the dark under a low ceiling. It’s dark. We’ve been debating what exactly to do with it for quite some time, and finally settled on a novel idea (Kim’s idea, of course): stripes. But to spice it up, we did stripes of the same color instead of the usual dichromatic compliments. Well, almost. We decided to take one color we liked and make alternating stripes of glossy and matte paint. First we primed, and then we scratched our heads at how to make stripes.

I started by painting the heck out of the to-be-matte sections. A few coats of eggshell did the trick. But then, a conundrum. By the way – inexpensive laser levels do not do the trick. We tried that and ended up with slight slants down or faint angles up – and two pinholes in the wall. Not good.

Eventually, Kim cut out some card stock and we had measuring tools that helped keep the tape level. Once the tape was lined up for equal-width beauty we touched a bit more eggshell along the tape to lock in any seepage. It allowed for straighter lines on the finished product, which was wonderful. But before we could get to the finished product, it was glossy time.

Now, the kitchen ceiling is almost finished (it didn’t match the rest of the house’s ceiling, inexplicably), but the kitchen is looking pretty snazzy with this face lift already. Just the paint itself brightens the deeps of the kitchen a lot, not to mention we replaced the original lamp with a little bit of track lighting. The difference between the gloss and the eggshell is more stark than I imagined, but I think it was for the better. We’ve got a bit more to do before we declare the room finished or redone, but it’s definitely on the way there.