That’s One and Two, under the kitchen sink.

When I last left you, we were on color #2ish (while the faux finish took several coats of different colors, I am counting it as one color). I finally got fed up with the baby poop color when I was pregnant with Three. That was October 2008. Remember the definition of insanity? I tried another shade of green. For a little while, it seemed like an improvement. We had sprung for granite countertops like the ones we remembered in that first apartment, and that made everything look nicer. When we did that, we bucked the double sink trend at that time and got a single big, deep sink that allows us to pile in a ton of dishes before they start to peek over the edge of it.

But the new green I’d chosen, which I believe was called Scotland Yard, had a high sheen and was next door to a red room, which is only a match made in heaven for one month out of the year.

I knew it wasn’t a keeper, and just a week or so before Three was born in spring of 2009, I painted again. This was the right color, and it ended up lasting for years. I made a curtain for the window above the sink that was satisfyingly bold.When Three was four months old, her two older siblings went for a week at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. I had long been thinking about what I wanted to do for my backsplash, and I planned to do it that week. My backsplash concept was inspired by one I saw in This Old House Magazine. The project no longer has a live link that I could find, but here’s the image that started the dream.I found Mexican Talavera tile on eBay, and a couple of mixed bags of 1-inch square multicolored tiles. I was able to get seconds, which made them much cheaper. As far as I can tell, they no longer sell them that way.

It turns out, while Three was a pleasant, easy baby, one of the things that kept her that way was the attention and company of her sibs. And when they left for the week away, she was not happy. I remember trying everything to get the backsplash up that week and keep her content. I was either wearing her and reaching around her, or bouncing her in her seat with one leg stretched out while I tried to get it done, talking to her the whole time. Both of us were pretty frustrated and unhappy that week. Nonetheless, the results of that project remain one of my favorite DIY efforts around the house. I had already replaced the bold kitchen curtain with a cream colored one. You can see the corner of it in the photo above.

The next project was painting the range hood copper, and adding a dinner bell. I spray painted indoors, which was a terrible idea, but at the time, it seemed better than figuring out how to take the range hood down so I could paint it outside. I taped everything off and covered the whole area with newspaper, and opened all the windows, which honestly, didn’t help at all. Friends, I know you know this in your hearts already, but never spray paint indoors.The range hood was followed by painting the upper kitchen cabinets. I took the doors permanently off the cabinets we keep the dishes in.Inspired by my mother in law’s pink cabinets in Tobago, I picked Burma Jade for the lower cabinets. Like the backsplash, that is a choice I’ve loved since the beginning. I painted them while the Chaplain was on a week-long trip to Florida as a chaperone for college students with Habitat for Humanity. He had a hotel room with beach views. I brought the beach to me. That’s number Two keeping an eye on the progress. I know it’s hard to tell, but that’s number One.

Another favorite feature of the kitchen is that with three of the cabinets, two on the bottom row and one on top, I put chalkboard paint on the inside of the doors. Sometimes we use it for Bible verses, messages, or reminders (right now, one says, “Give Thanks, and Stick it to the Devil.” and the other two have doodles). Number Four took a liking to this cabinet in particular, and that’s him in both pics.

At some point, we said goodbye to our back door. It was the original, and had a four-pane window on the top half, and the bottom half, the previous owners had cut in a cat door.  Since we don’t have a cat, it only let in drafts. Once soon after we first moved in, One and I somehow got locked outside with baby Two inside. She tearfully stayed by the cat door while we talked to one another through the hole until I figured out how to get back into the house. I still don’t remember how I got back inside. I do remember desperately trying to tell her how to unlock the door, but she was either too short or too young to understand how to do it.

I plugged the cat door hole up not long after, but it was an uneven hole, and I am not a master carpenter. There was no way to make the patch seamless with my skill level.

When we got a new door, I went for a full window. For the first couple of years, I cleaned the glass obsessively, while being joyful for every extra ray of sun that poured through. Now, the fingerprints bother me much less, and we’ve been known to use it as a message board.At this point, the kitchen was in a really good place. But of course, I wasn’t finished. Keep an eye out for Part III. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.