tales of a very ugly kitchen: paint

With our big ticket purchases on the books for the kitchen, we put our remaining funds–actually dwindling, is more like it–toward paint. Removing the wallpaper border at the ceiling revealed the original pastel pink (pink!) paint from yesteryear. I’m beginning to think the previous homeowners ate sherbet constantly, or at least were culinarily inspired by shades of sherbet.

After some heckling from my husband (who paints in his underwear, by the way) about which shade of beige I’d choose for this project, I bristled and plunged forth fearfully (and, I’ll admit, spitefully), toward color. I was actually shocked at my own color epiphany, when “orange” rang in my head as an accent wall possibility.  I heard the color gods saying, “Embrace the orange!” So I did a double take, and had to admit, all signs were pointing to orange. The foyer tile that I truly believe once graced the floors of a fine Mexican restaurant had many orange tones. The African mahogany trim that, according to the aforementioned husband who paints in his skivvies, is extremely exotic and hard to paint, also has orange tones.  (On the trim topic, I don’t buy it, and it WILL be painted, someday… but I digress.)  The hard truth is, there’s no escaping the orange in this house. I realized that I can’t afford new foyer flooring and new trim, but I can choose a color that might actually enhance these sad relics.

Once again, I repeated my “this is a cheap kitchen remodel” mantra and started painting samples in shades of orange on the accent wall. I homed in on a terra cotta shade (B.M. Sienna Clay #104), and after two coats on the wall and the initial color shock, it started to grow on me. For the cabinet walls, I chose a beautiful creamy beige (B.M. Alpaca #1074) that soothed the orange and charcoal gray tones and warmed up the white appliances.  More beige? “Okay, okay, ya gotta have a little neutral in the mix to take that orange down a notch,” I defended to my painting partner.  ”Now go put some pants on so I can concentrate on cutting in!”

spray painting frames for a new look

Do you ever get your best ideas in the shower? You’ve got no pen, no access to any method of recording your thought, so you just have to repeat it (for 8 seconds, actually, in order for it to transition into your long-term, short-term memory, or something like that, according to our dad’s best secretary ever). So I got this idea in the shower of how to pull the art in my bedroom together, and I already had everything I needed for this little ditty of a project.

For a wedding gift many years ago, we’d received these black and white prints of the beach in simple, natural wood frames. This pair has graced the living room, family room, and bedroom of various apartments and iterations of our house in Chicago, and is now living in the master bedroom of our Denver house.  Prior to my shower epiphany, I had just framed a painting of pine trees in Keystone for my husband in a black frame, and was loving how it played off our black iron bed frame. But these black and white prints which flanked the bed sides were lost.  So I got out my can of flat black spray paint, leftover from painting the bedside lamps months before, and got shakin’.

When spray painting a frame, there are two possible roads to travel, and the path you follow depends entirely on whether you can remove the glass and print below.  If so, just pop everything out, lay your frame down face up on a drop cloth and spray light coats, allowing a minute or so between coats for drying.

Here’s the natural wood frame before…

and here’s the after shot of the same collection of frames.

 Now, if your frame does not allow you to pop out the glass and print or painting below, here’s how to protect the glass and get the same effect with the spray paint.

Step 1:  Use painter’s tape to edge the four sides of the glass.

Step 2:  Use newspaper or newsprint to cover the glass by attaching the paper with more painter’s tape.  Be sure to adhere to your tape border, not the frame.

Step 3:  Spray away using light, smooth strokes.  It’s better to recoat several times that to spray to heavily.  You’ll avoid drips this way.

Step 4:  After an hour or so, spray painted items can be handled. Remove the tape and paper and discard. Since these were hanging by our bedsides, though, I gave them a few days to off gas before hanging, so we wouldn’t inhale fumes while we slept.

I love how the black frames now tie the art together in the room.

The painting of a pine forest in Keystone that I had framed for Steve set this whole idea in motion.

And our grouping of wedding photos.  Since we’ve been married, we’ve always hung this collection in our bedroom somewhere, but in this room I got the idea to nail the group of eight together in order to hang them tightly.  Ah, we were such youngsters…

So there you go, can’t get much easier than spray paint.  Have you spray painted anything lately for a big or small transformation?  Give it up, stylista!