Pictured above, number Two in the kitchen of our first home, when she was one year old. We had just moved in.

When I was in college, I worked in a sporting goods store on breaks from school for a couple of years. I remember one of my coworkers rolling his eyes and sighing because his mom had made him, his dad, and his brother paint their kitchen for a fifth time because it wasn’t the right shade of yellow. I commiserated. Who does that?!

A few years later, I was married and living in our first apartment, the upper floor of an old house on Long Island. It wasn’t a typical apartment; the walls were painted shades of brown and gold. There was original dark trim and wood built-ins were throughout our upstairs dwelling. The kitchen had granite countertops and cheery, sunshine yellow paint.

The house our rental was in was situated in a strange way. It seemed as though it used to have a much bigger plot of land around it. It looked like some previous owner and had gradually sold off bits of the land to different developers, so that our street ended just after our house in a small sort of road that led past one more house and to a nursing home whose entrance was clearly visible from our kitchen window. You can just see the nursing home in the background to the right behind the trees in the photo above. (We used this pic in our immigration interview photo album, but that’s another story. Keep an eye out for it this summer.)

The nursing home employees would come outside to smoke on their breaks and it always felt like they were looking in our windows, but I hated to assume. One day, on a whim, I raised my hand and casually waved from the kitchen window at the indifferent-looking woman standing outside the nursing home’s entrance. She waved back as it if that was totally normal. After that, I made yellow half-curtains for the window above the sink to match our cheery walls and block part of our neighbors’ view.

Even though the location was weird, and we lived there during the tumultuous first year of our marriage, we always had good memories of that apartment and its small but beautiful little kitchen. 

A couple of years later when we bought our house, I think we both had that first apartment kitchen in the back of our minds, even though the kitchen in our new house looked nothing like it.

The countertops were laminate with a faux finish that was supposed to make it look like stone. The walls were wood paneling painted cream. The ceilings were dropped 6 inches, and the floor was a peeling, yellowing white and grey sheet vinyl. But the morning light shining through the windows above the sink made the whole place glow.

We closed in mid April of 2008. By the end of April, I had already gotten the Chaplain to help me take down the drop ceiling and wood paneling. I still remember his hesitancy about the ceiling, and he was right to be cautious. It was a mess, and what was underneath was pretty bad. When I removed the fluorescent light above, it revealed two huge holes that had to be filled in, which meant I was like Michelangelo for a week filling in the holes and then buttering them smooth. But that drop ceiling had to go.

The line around the top of the room that marked the start of the old drop ceiling? That’s because one of the previous owners put up wallpaper after the drop ceiling was installed, and everyone who came after painted over the wallpaper, including me. That left a nice, visible ridge that went around the perimeter of the room.

Finally, when I was pregnant with either Four or Six, I skim coated it. I also used an eggshell paint finish, and now you wouldn’t know I was too lazy to painstakingly remove wallpaper unless you knew what to look for. After doing more patching than I have ever done in my life, I chose a pale green for the walls. I remember knowing I was going to hate it immediately, but I had already started, so I finished the job. If you’re considering painting any rooms in your house and you’re tempted by a color called Aged Marble, just say no.

When it came to fixing that first color fail, I used the faux glaze I had leftover from the wall in our second apartment with the intention of doing something similar in the kitchen.If you click the above photo, it’ll take you to the post where I mention that original wall. It was great. But since I was starting out with a coat of green in the kitchen, I had to go with a different color palette this time. After one coat of the faux finish, it was still light green, and maybe looking even worse than when we started.When I added a couple more layers of color, I got…. baby poop brown. It was disappointing. With a lot patching and a fresh coat of paint, at least the ceiling was looking much better.

To distract myself from those walls, though, I had us start on the floors. Our oldest child helped. We still have those socks he’s wearing. Well, we have one of them. The finished floors looked amazing. And they kind of matched the baby poop walls.

After we installed the new floor, I did some experimenting to get the right color, and then stained a new toe kick to match the existing cabinets. I’m pretty proud of the results. But not too proud to resist painting over it a few years later.

Here’s the progress so far. And that’s where I’ll leave you. In a baby poop-colored kitchen with very nice floors.

If you want to know what happened next, keep an eye out for Part II.