Kitchen, day 2: my skills of an artist
June 1, 2005
Today was a hot day for the Belcher kitchen. It went red.
The picture shows the red a bit brighter, redder if you will, than it is in RL. But that's the flash. Natural light pictures tomorrow... when the natural light returns.
First thing today I did was... well, sleep in. But after that I scrubbed down the south and west walls. This is when I began to really notice the former owners' peculiar - and annoying - habits with painting. It's come up once or twice in our other rooms, but the kitchen is where they really, uh, shine. See, I think of painting as primarily a matter of preparation. These people, apparently, thought of painting as a job that didn't call for preparation at all. The nuttiest thing is that they left the hardware in the walls. Picture hangers. In the walls. Under the coat of paint. Actually, one of the picture hangers was under two coats of paint. Needless to say, this created quite a problem. First of all, it means big globs of paint that need to be scraped and sanded away; furthermore, it made some of the drywall come away with the hardware when I pulled it out. Cringe.
So I got out my spackle and spackled the wall. Presto. This is bothering me at the moment because the paint over the spackle has a different texture to it than the rest of the wall. It doesn't look as shiny. I know, my life is so hard. So I'm a perfectionist. So sue me.
Speaking of perfectionism, one thing I wondered a bit about was the inside of the radiator cover - in the back. You can see it, and right now it's that same shade of blue, so I wanted to paint it. But I'm a Florida girl, and radiators are alien territory. "What if it's a fire hazard?" (It's a radiator: nothing seems too farfetched.) So finally I decided that if the former residents painted the inside of the radiator, I could paint it too, concluding (despite manifest evidence to the contrary!) that "they must have known what they were doing". That, as well as the second coat of red, is on tomorrow's playlist.
Signing off in the world of inexpert kitchen remodeling, I remain,
Kim B.