I love those commercials where someone picks out a paint color, and the next scene is them in their newly painted room looking happy. They seem to have left the middle part out ("at this point, a miracle occurs"). The part where you drag everything out of the way, put down drop cloths, scrub things clean. And, in the case of painting cabinets, taking off all of the doors (28 of them), removing the hinges and door pulls (total of 328 screws), taking the doors outside to the sawhorses and painting them, painting all the cabinet frames, and putting those 328 screws back in. Oh--and I did a copper wash on the hinges and [lizard] door pulls.
And deal with the drying time. I had space out on the porch to paint four doors at a time. According to the paint can, allow "1 hour to dry to touch, 2 hour before recoating." Not in Florida in the summer! One day I thought I'd get ambitious and try to paint a set before I went to work (at 11:00). I got the first coat on at 7:30, went out to do the second coat at 10:00 and absolutely no drying had taken place. About the time I was sick and tired of the whole process the kitchen looked like this:
Getting there--when I was waiting for one set of doors to dry, I could put the hardware back onto the previous day's painting and hang those. But it was one of those cases of being *almost* done but never quite getting there. Especially for the last set of doors--I knew I had about 15 minutes of painting to do--and I had to wait 5 hours to do it, then until the next day to hang them. Arrrghhhh! The drawers had been painted earlier, but it was easier to re-attach the doors without them being in the way so we pulled them out, which mean running into the living room every time we needed a spoon.
But it's done (almost. It will always be almost. We still have to put in some trim and decide what to do with the window frame and maybe get a new light over the sink). And I'm happy, because I think it's beautiful. So here's where we started
And here's where we are.
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