Kitchy Kitchy Cool

Anyone who has visited my house has been told the sad (sad, sad, SAD) tale of our kitchen remodel, but I've not posted about it because it's just too depressing. But finally, we got it fixed, so here's the whole tale, made easily readable for those of you with short attention spans. Like me.

1. Move in. Kitchen cabinets are deep brown with a brick veneer backsplash. Well, they tried to be cute, I guess.
2. Paint Kitchen green, which doesn't match brown cabinets, but DOES match our plans to...
3. Paint the cabinets WHITE. This is done over a period of about 2 months, since it takes so many dang coats of white to make it look perfect.
4. Perfect! Seal it off with polyurethane so no kids' sticky fingers will damage the paint job

The day we finished!

 

5. Put in new countertops, sink, and white subway tile backsplash. The job looks GREAT!
Until we start to notice the white cabinets next to the white tile are not looking so white anymore...

Two weeks later...

 

Four weeks later...

That's when we discover:
6. POLYURETHANE DAMAGES THE PAINT JOB. Turns out we used oil-based, which turns white paint yellow; what we needed was water-based. We were SO CLOSE!
7. Cry. Pout. Discuss the benefits of leaving it smoker-stained yellow. But mostly pout.
8. Wait until  a string of family visits happens over the summer, then disassemble the yellow kitchen cabinets.

After a complete kitchen re-do, we're forced to begin again

9. Pout.
10. Over a 2-month period, strip ALL the paint off - this step took as long, if not longer, than painting the cabinets the first time. All that work so the cabinets can be at square one again, back to a deep brown....*sigh*
11. Re-prime, re-paint, re-hang.

12. Never do that again.

Now up next in the kitchen saga will be cleaning the tile and grout.  It's tan with dark splotches, and never looks clean no matter how swept & mopped I keep it. Kari pinned a grout-cleaning recipe that I decided to try, since the girl's "before" picture looks exactly like my kitchen right now...

...and sure enough, her "in progress" picture look exactly the same as mine!

Turns out my grout is tan, not brown! The tile is all light, no dark splotches! But it takes some serious scrubbing with a hand-brush to get all the low texture points clean. We'll re-seal the tile and grout when I'm done. Not with oil-based polyurethane, of course.

 So the recipe is 7 cups water, 1/2 cup baking soda, 1/3 cup ammonia, and 1/4 cup vinegar. It smells slightly of vinegar, but mostly it smells like nothing. For something that smells like nothing, it works like EVERYTHING. Please come over soon to "ooooh" and "ahhhhh" in person!