Remodeling My Kitchen Part III: Painting the Walls

The walls in the kitchen are not something we really think about very often. Appliances as the refrigerator and the cabinets cover a big part of the kitchen walls, so we don’t have them in front of us all the time, asking for our attention.

But when we decide to remodel our kitchen, we have to paint the kitchen walls, as part of the refacing process.

The house my husband and I bought, the love of our lives, is more then eleven years old. And the past owners were kind of, we can say, creative. The kitchen walls were painted in a strong rabiously acid green apple color, which hurt your eyes when you saw it as well as your teeth. And following the union of walls and ceiling they had applied a nauseously border full of roosters and vine grapes.

All that had to go.

The first problem we faced when we started cleaning the kitchen walls before paint them was that the paper border was to tightly attached to the walls that was almost impossible to separate it. We tried the Piranha system, a spray can with a razor, the spray delivers a dissolvent and we work with the razor, but it was a slow process. After a couple of days working hard, we took out almost all the pieces of the paper, but small pieces still were attached to the walls. We used a stronger dissolvent that we allowed to work n the walls overnight. That is the problem of paper borders: eliminate them.

After rid over of the paper border, we applied the primer, and we chased the paint. It is better to choose a glossy or high glossy paint for the kitchen, because this kind of paint is easier to clean. Many people are choosing these days panel to install in the kitchen walls. They can be real wood panels that go to the half length of the kitchen’s walls, or a material that imitates wood.

And others are applying paper and wall coverings to their kitchens, in a nostalgic remembrance of the past. The paper and wall coverings these days are very easy of install and eliminate, and very easy to clean.

My husband and I choose terracotta brown for the kitchen walls, because it matches the paint in the family room and the breakfast nook. This color also masks fingerprints and the eventual drop of ketchup.

We install a tile backsplash over the sink and under the window, matching the colors on our countertops. That was pretty easy: after measuring the area under the window, we bought panels of tile. We applied primer and cement to the area, and we attached the tile panels. Easy as cake.

We did more things during the process of remodeling our kitchen, but they will come in next articles.