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| Ta-da! |
Oh yes, it's part two of the post you never asked for - the rest of the kitchen, in absolutely no particular order...
The Floor
I've already explained how we made over the cabinets, but in all honesty they were probably the least offensive thing in the room.
The walls were a sort of curdled cream colour which was blah but whatever, but the floor... the floor I was not loving.
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| The floor before... |
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From the moment we put an offer in on the house I declared my intent to paint the floor. Those of you who've met me personally might have noticed that, on the odd ocassion, I have a very slight tendancy to err towards the dramatic (you may not have, it's so very very subtle), so I told Alex, my family, and anyone who would listen that the floor was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen and I couldn't bear to think of it pulling down the dream I had for the rest of the space. They all nodded at me and started to back slowly away, which I assume was because they were in awe of my ambition and not because they feared that the crazy floor girl might move on to another equally thrilling topic, like door hinges.
There were even some (*cough cough* my boyfriend and *cough cough* my mother) who weren't super convinced by the idea of painting a floor, even after I'd shown them the several posts I'd found via Pinterest of people managing to paint tiled floors succesfully (see my 'Crafty' board). They thought it would turn out patchy, or chip off, or generally look a bit weird.
To them I say: WHO'S CRAZY NOW, HUH? Look at that floor! Look at it! OK, it's not exactly going to trick anyone into thinking we laid brand-new tiling, but considering tiles are expensive and we didn't want to chuck them and replace with vinyl or lino just because they weren't to our taste I think the floor looks pretty damn good - and it sits much better with the rest of the room.
It was also pretty easy to do.
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| Still drying |
Obviously, we haven't moved in yet so it's still TBC about how the paint holds up, but so far so good and we've been traipsing up and down it washing brushed and taking things through to the bathroom (our next project, perhaps?) all week and it still looks good. Let's wait and see how it fares when Alex's dog comes to live with us...
The Walls
Easiest, quickest and cheapest transformation.
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| Old paint vs new paint |
However, because of the whole rented house/landlord walls thing, we were wary of turning the room into a plain white box, so we decided to add some drama with, of course, a chalboard wall:
I'm so glad we did. Originally we were considering putting that on the wall above and around the cooker/chimney breast, but we weren't sure how the paint would react to steam etc. from using the hob. In retrospect, this was the most obvious wall to paint black anyway, as it's the only one that natural light will never directly hit. As you can see from the photo, the sink looks into a little sun room which is the main source of sunlight for the kitchen, and this wall has it's back to that, as it were. We haven't had chance to draw or write on it yet, but once we're actually moved in I'll buy some chalk and have a field day. It's also suposedly magnetic, so we'll see about that...
We used Rust-Oleum Black Magic and gave it two good coats plus a couple of top-ups (turns out it's really quite tricky to get a clean line between black walls and white woodwork!), and we've still got about half a tin left.
The Oven
Mirroring the chalk wall, but technically not the same paint, is the chimney breast that the oven sits in:
This is masonry paint, because as you can - kind of? - see, the back wall is brick. This is how that space looked before:
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| Finally! A picture from the same angle! |
The second one is, what... happened... here? To that, I think I have an answer - or at least, an educated guess. It looks like, once upon a time, there was an oven in the chimney breast - possibly the original range? - that was torn out in order to replace it with something newer. Whoever did that did not then replaster, or replace the skirting, or do literally anything else, leaving us with a dusty, crumbly mess.
One day, I'd love to get an oven that actually fits snugly in here, and maybe even tile it (?!), but for now I'm pretty happy with our fixes.
First, we (ok, my Mum) hoovered, dusted and generally cleaned the hell out of the space behind the oven. Then, we (ok, Alex) painted it black on the pretty inspired advice of my Mum (who is quite good at this stuff despite her lack of confidence in my floor painting schemes) who pointed out that it would "hide a multitude of sins". It does, and it also a) makes the brickwork look cool and like a style choice rather than unfinished, and b) kind of grounds the chalkboard wall by making it a feature rather than a random black wall floating amongst the white. It also turns the whole area into a focal point and makes it pop on the wall and basically I just really love it.
Finally, we filled in that stupid gap next to the oven so that we wouldn't just end up gathering more dust and crap down there, plus now we have a useful little surface for when we're cooking. Yay for making the space useable!
The gap-filler is a very complex and intricately engineered custom piece, made of difficult-to-get-hold-of materials like MDF, a cheap pine shelf from B&Q, and a couple of brackets.
We cut the MDF to size, then I primed and painted it to match the cupboards. It's attached to the wall via this bracket.
The top I think is this shelf, also cut to size and treated with beeswax to make it water resistant (but not heat resistant - we'll get a heatproof mat or a couple of trivets for if/when we need to put hot pans down). It is resting on another bracket at the back of the wall plus a piece of MDF along the edge, and sealed around the sides with a clear polymer sealer. The gas tap is in the gap beneath it so we need to be able to easily access that - we can cut the sealer and lift the shelf right off if we need to turn the tap off/on at any point.
I'm quite tempted to put a shelf up over the oven/fireplace area to keep our cookbooks on and lean in to the oven-in-a-fireplace thing by mirroring a mantelpiece, but we need to work out measurements first to make sure Alex doesn't risk concusion by headbutting it every time he wants to boil something.
Finally - The Tiles
Just when you thought this post would never end!
I think what I've learned most from this whole experience is that, clichéd as it sounds, sometimes a lick of paint is all you need to totally transform something. I'm well aware that our kitchen isn't going to appear in Good Housekeeping any time soon, and it definitely has a DIY feel to it (which I love, because hell yeah we did it ourselves and it looks fucking fabulous!), but it looks so much better than it did even a couple of weeks ago when we first walked in there.
The backsplash above the surface is a pretty good example of this:
Originally, they had the same patchwork beige thing going on as the floor did, and again when everything else was painted they looked really quite sad - especially because when compared to the new white walls, they didn't look that bright any more.
I did a quick 'n dirty paint job on them last Friday night with Ronseal Tile Paint in Brilliant White - one coat over pretty much everything, with a bit more attention to the beige squares (which are raised, by the way, because of course they are) and tidied up the next day with a grouting pen. It was in no way a necessary job, but I'm glad I did it because it felt like a finishing touch that took the room from "we'll fix what needs fixing" to "let's redesign this place".
Oh, and in case you've been wondering where the fridge is in all of this - you can see it there, in the top picture. It lives under the stairs because it's parents died in a ~mysterious~ car crash and it does our household chores for us, but we are a bit confused about how it freed that snake the one time we took it to the zoo.
