Painting: It’s A Lot More Work than You Think It is (First Attempt Painting Our Kitchen)

Since moving in I’ve known that we’d have lots of work to do on the walls of our new apartment. We moved into an apartment that seems like it hasn’t been cleaned properly in years. The walls are covered with holes, cracks and every room is slapped with dirty and what looks like a brown liquid. Honestly, there are so many places in this apartment where I question how did dirt even reach this part of the wall? 

I guess it’s one thing as a millennial I haven’t thought about before. Growing up walls were just walls, I’ve only seen them painted once in my life and that was when I was fairly young. After years of begging my sister and I finally got to paint our rooms the colour that we wanted (since before my family always said we had to paint them white for re-sellability.)

I wasn’t part of the painting process in my family home, I can’t remember exactly what caused my mom to want to repaint the house, although I seem to remember it was because we received some extra insurance money from our house “flooding” from toilet backflow.

Yesterday I tried painting our new kitchen and let me tell you, millennial laziness is real. Time and time again I think about hiring a painter to just do our apartment, but the thought of paying someone to do a job I could do doesn’t make sense, especially because we have a lot of the paint already.

I took my shot at putting on the base coat and it took much longer than I thought it was going to take. Note: All of these pictures are from the first layer, I didn’t get a chance to put on the second yet since my partner came home.

So far, so good. Looks like a decent first layer. Challenging bits for me are the corners of the rooms obviously, and I need to retape our cupboards to make sure I feel secure enough to paint right next to them. 

I think I’m going to take a day pause on painting the house though as I think it needs to be a bit of a two-person job. The number of times it would have been nice to get a “hand me this” or “can you retape that” made it evident that this wasn’t a job I wanted to do alone.

I will say, seeing the walls white (well, splotchy white) has made me even more excited to paint the kitchen. To this day the kitchen has been extremely dark and I want to find a way to bring more light into it… and I think the main issue is the walls and floors. The floors are very light and the walls are an ugly matte yellow that doesn’t seem to reflect light. While I can’t change the flooring, because… c’mon who has the time, money or patience for that right now, I can change the type of paint on the walls to a lighter, more reflective and glossy paint. Hopefully, that does the trick.

I have a few cute paint designs I want to try out in this place. I can already see my sister shaking her head at me in disapproval, but whatever… it’s my home!