Saturday, July 28, 2007

The paint is on - and our inspiration for colors

Paint colors seem to choose themselves, if you're lucky enough to have a lot of clues left by the original decorators. We knew we wanted yellow (our theme in the house), with a red accent to help meld the kitchen in with the adjacent dining room; and of course the classic kitchen green color, which we've got as spot accents in the dining and living rooms. We found tiles with all three colors for the backsplash from an ebay vendor who happens to be here in Maine (http://www.newenglandarttiles.com/), and we were off. As we started taking off kitchen layers, however, our choices became even clearer, and helped guide us to the right tones.

First, we found this fab old scrap of linoleum underneath a cabinet, someone apparently left that time capsule. So we felt better about featuring the seafoam green, and including a bit of red.


Next, we had always known that an older floor was green & grayish checkerboard, and a happy find at Marden's (our local salvage type retailer) got us all our flooring in a very similar pattern & colors for about $30. Can't beat that. The new tiles are solid vinyl, which apparently will last forever, and we'll be installing it & blogging about it later. This afternoon: fun with perfecting the underlayment. Ugh, long story, we'll get into it in the floor blog.

Then, when we pulled the old wallpaper, we found both yellow (multiple shades of a really similar tone to that we picked) and green under there! They outlined where old cabinets and other walls had been, interesting little mental reconstruction there.

So we've bought all our paint (gasp!) and we've now finished the ceiling - which included cladding a soffit where the old wall used to be with beadboard - and the walls. It looks awesome - no more technicolor dreamcoat! On to the floor ......

4 comments:

Durf said...

I like that kind of green for a kitchen. I painted mine a color called Soft Jade, by Behr, to match Jadeite pottery.

The Litter Box House said...

Very exciting! I've been reading the rest of your blog and have a question about your stripping (you did stairs & windows right?). What product did you use? I'm stripping my stairs and would love some advice.

Andrea

sarah said...

Hi - I haven't done the stairs, fortunately they were unpainted (though covered with green brain carapet). I did have to do parts of the stair trim, like the stringers. We use a variety of paint stripping methods, depending on the job and sometimes the mood! We assume everything is lead paint, so we never ever sand anything. We use a heat gun for starters, to get the big stuff off. This works really well in our house, because they painted right over the old shellac/varnish, and the heat gun basically heats up that shellac layer, and it slides right off with the paint. Then I go back and clean up using a wet stripper - sometimes I use citristrip, sometimes peel away. If almost all of the paint is gone, I sometimes just scrub with a green scrubby pad (like scotch brite) and regular old rubbing alcohol - but you should test on a small section first because the alcohol can darken some woods, and if you have light wood, the green scrubby can stain it green! I would test everything, frankly. I always wear gloves and usually a respirator for fumes, even for the alcohol - they all can get to you after a while. You'll need lots of gloves - they get gross and splinters will punture them, then you'll start leaking! Splinters are a serious issue - even with gloves I usually have lots that often don't come out for a while - I've had some real painful ones. I sometimes wear those rubber-dipped work gloves under my rubber disposable stripping gloves if I'm getting a lot of stabs! On windows, I always use citristrip. It's gloppy and gross, but it's my old standby. I do them outside. Peel away claims its ok for inside, so I use that on trim that isn't removed (if the heat gun wasn't appropriate for some reason, like carvings or places the heat gun won't go). We never take the chance of cracking window sashes with the heat gun, which is why I always strip those wet. However we get the majority of paint off, after that I clean up the little stubborn bits either by scrubbing with wet stripper & green scrubby or with alcohol & scrubby. Then we do the world's quickest sanding with like 150-ish paper just to remove any stripper residue and smooth out if there were any splinters or raised grain (or wood filler for the millions of curtain rods they HAD to install), then tackcloth and finish. Woo hoo!You'll need a bunch of dental picks, scrapers, etc. to clean up some spots. A really dull chisel works well for a lot of things - it doesn't tend to accidentally gouge the wood. They take PATIENCE. In fact it all does. When you first start you'll wonder how you'll ever finish, but you just have to keep plugging and take lots of breaks/come back to it later. I find that I actually kind of look forward to it now! The results are so satisfying, it is always worth it - we have beautiful flat-grain fir under there! I feel pretty guilty that we're painting the kitchen trim, but it seems to have always been painted and painting it is more period appropriate. Anyways, what a ramble! Good luck and let me know how it goes - seriously, just take your time and be patient. If you can master pulling the trim out and working on it outside in a workshop/garage, it's much cleaner and easier that way. Disclaimer: I'm an amateur and I'm just telling you what we do, no implied warranties, etc. :)

The Litter Box House said...

Wow, thanks! I think your explaination is the best of all the people I've corresponded with. I've heard that citristrip and peel away are good, so I'm glad to hear that you agree.

BTW, we used to work in Maine as archaeologists - 1997-1998. Then we worked up at Pittston Farm for a winter - ever gone there? We would go to Bangor on our days off for some "city" life. Pittston was in the boonies! We loved Maine and considered moving there for grad school. I completely miss Bar Harbor...