Crazy Kitchen: Part Three: The Power of Paint

To give myself a little credit, when we bought this home we were moving from an old house where primitive styling was perfect. Everything I owned was county, primitive, or Americana. And that was what I liked, at the time. So that is how I decorated our new home. (I actually have zero photos of the whole space. Strange.)

Fast forward about 2 years and my 1970's ranch was screaming at me about not being primitive. My taste and style had evolved with our home and it was time to get rid of the oh so yellow and maroon kitchen!

Something you may not know about me; I am an oops paint addict! I mean it. I have a true addiction. No one even questions me now. As soon as I enter Lowes my first steps are towards my oops paint. And my husband barely even grumbles about it anymore. But with well over 30 gallons of miscellaneous colors, I had to do something! So I mixed and mixed and tested it on the wall and mixed and mixed and tested it on the wall.... you get the idea. So I had a kitchen wall that looked like this for a couple of months...

Then FINALLY the day came that the ceiling was finished and I was ready to get onto the walls! Check it out!!!

What a breath of fresh air!

And all my oops paints (mostly Valspar, all semi-gloss) did an AMAZING job! No primer and just two coats of paint. Ahhh, MUCH better!

Another thing; I argued with myself over whether or not I should paint the ceiling in my dining area and hallway. I LOATH ceilings. But I knew it must be done. And I am so glad I did it. I used a Dutch Boy Ceiling Paint and was really not all that awful and I only had to do one coat. Score! I highly recommend painting your ceiling. It will really brighten up your space!

So that ends my Crazy Kitchen Posts (for now, you never know when something might come up)! I am excited to get onto some building projects for this space!

More from the Crazy Kitchen Series:

Crazy Kitchen: Part One

Crazy Kitchen: Part Two (ceiling details)

Crazy Kitchen: Part Two (ceiling details)

So on we went with putting the panels on the ceiling (with the help of two wonderful jack-y things we purchased at Harbor Freight. Let me tell anyone who might think of doing this. It's hard and no fun and even harder if you are a perfectionist (who me, perfectionist??)!  Start by marking out your ceiling joists with a chalk line. We used only screws to attach but I would use glue and screws if I were to do it again to help prevent waves). Starting in one corner work your way to the other side while having a helper push out as much waviness as possible. The sides seams, on the beads, are fairly easy to match and look almost seamless if you take your time. But the butt joints, where ends meet, are impossible to make look good.

Side note; at some point in time, after taking out this weird dumb soffit, my husband insisted that we take out this other section of weird dumb soffit. It REALLY opened up the space but was very messy!

Once you have all your panels up you can fill screw holes and work on your seams (you probably want to countersink your screws and may need to use a countersink bit for this). We used spackle and it took a few coats (and is still not perfect but who cares? My perfectionism only lasted so long.). The screws holes are pretty easy and self explanatory; fill em, that's it. For the bead seams I stuffed some spackle in the seams and smoothed with my finger til it looked good. Pretty easy. Let it all dry and sand carefully (don't want to scratch your panels too much). Repeat as necessary.

Here we are after the first round of filling. You can also see that the joint on the beam has been planed, sanded, and filled.



The Beam: Fairly straightforward to do. This Ana link can help a lot. Ours is similar.

Then onto the trim boards. We first attached 1x3's along the entire perimeter. Then we used a 1x4 down the big ugly butt joint seam. Then placed another one equidistance on the other side. Then we filled those screw holes and it was time to paint!

Here is my sweet husband working hard on trim.

I chose to use a semi-gloss. I know I know. Semi gloss on the ceiling?! God Forbid! But it was what I wanted. I didn't want to have this beautiful but dull ceiling. And I am very happy with it. I used the off the shelf white Valspar from Lowes. It is worth the extra cost over the cheap-o stuff (trust me, I found out the hard and $$ way).

I could not be happier with this ceiling. It makes such a change and a big statement. Love it! We will be doing the same in our laundry room!

More from the Crazy Kitchen Series:

Crazy Kitchen: Part One

Crazy Kitchen: Part Three: The Power of Paint

Crazy Kitchen: Part One

Things I've learned.... blogging is really hard when you have three kids of your own plus one other that you babysit. When I do find time to sit down at my computer there is usually a child on my leg or toys piled in my lap and I am thinking about the fact that I have laundry that needs to be taken out of the washer. But for now I am just blogging for fun and to keep track of my little projects and home milestones, so no pressure.

Do you want to see a few pictures of our most recent home milestone? Meet the ceiling of "Crazy Kitchen". Labor-of-love! **Warning, forgive the variety of awfully lit pictures in all Crazy Kitchen posts. Thanks!**

 Two weekends before I had back surgery, way back in February, we I had this spur of the moment "Hey lets change our ceilings throughout half the house" moment. I had seen bead board ceilings all around internet land and without much research we headed out to the store and bought a ton of bead board panels to install the weekend before my surgery.

Then I researched. First thing I learned and realized once I actually thought about it... it was going to be H.A.R.D to get these panels on the ceiling! And the second thing I learned was that bead board panels are not even close to being fire retardant. So that put a halt to my plans because we intended to run the bead board throughout the entire kitchen and dining area plus the adjoining hallway. The dining area has a wood burning stove which meant no way was I putting bead board panels on my ceiling!

So plans changed and I researched scraping the popcorn (barf) off of the ceilings. We did a test spot and thought it should be pretty easy and planned to get to work ASAP.

Before icky-ness:

And after an HOUR of hard sweaty work:

We had gotten almost no where :(. Square one... what do we do??? Have an aha moment of course! We used this one big room like two rooms anyway, so why not make it more like two rooms? We could install a faux beam and divide off the kitchen area and still use the bead board panels to cover the giant mess we had just made!

We ended up installing the panels, a faux beam, and then trimming it all out to hide the seams and edges.

I will do a full detailed instruction in another post because it is going to be wordy. So stay tuned for that! If you have any questions in the mean time feel free to ask! And I hope you all have a happy and SAFE 4th of July Holiday!



More From the Crazy Kitchen Series

Crazy Kitchen: Part Two (ceiling details)
Crazy Kitchen: Part Three: The Power of Paint