When we bought our house, it was pretty much move-in ready.

The sellers put in new carpet (teal green, not really my first choice, but …), and had a fresh coat of white paint in most rooms.

The exceptions?

A half bathroom, which we named the ‘Santa Fe’ bathroom. There is no photographic evidence, you’ll just have to trust me that this actually existed!

This small power room had beige walls as a backdrop, but everything went downhill from there. They chose salmon pink (kind of like this!) to paint the vanity cabinet, baseboard and trim around the door.

The color of the toilet is what they call “bone”, thank God, but it had a matching salmon pink toilet seat shaped like a shell. And of course, the theme’s namesake, a stick-on border along the ceiling. Something along these lines, but add lots of aqua blue and (salmon pink).

The pink toilet seat is long gone, but I have an example in white from the guest bath. Obviously, the toilet seat was especially selected to coordinate with the shell sinks (which we have in all three bathrooms)!

The other exception? The kitchen, which I was really intended to write about tonight when I got lost reminiscing about the Santa Fe bathroom!

As purchased, we inherited an “interesting” sponge-painting backsplash in the kitchen. They used all the leftover paint from the rest of the house (yes, there was salmon pink in there, as well as the cabinet blue, dark green, and brown.)

The white splotches? They sponged over randomly-placed bits of tape, then removed the tape. We don’t know what they were going for.

One day, I had enough and the sponge painting had to go! I seem to recall living with the above kitchen for about a year and a half, so this project would have started in early 2003.

Phase 1: Sponge painting goes bye-bye.

Yes, the colors are odd … but I’m going somewhere.

I initially began stripping the paint off the cabinets, since I would have preferred natural wood. Being a new do-it-yourselfer, though, I realized I wasn’t going to get them as light as I’d like, so I decided to paint them.

It looked good; since I stripped the thick glossy blue paint, you could still see the wood grain … but I was stuck stripping the rest of the cabinets. (It would have been years quicker to just sand and paint over the blue! Literally, you’ll see!)

Phase 2: painting the cabinets.

Much better, right?

Well, that’s only half the kitchen! I can’t really remember how long it took to get this far, but it stayed like this for quite some time:

Actually, not quite like that. The cabinet with no door was also still blue up until April 2006, when we bought a new refrigerator. I wanted to paint the cabinets surrounding the fridge while the old one was still in place, just in case.

Since April 2006, nothing changed. The three missing doors were partially stripped, sitting in the garage. These photos were taken tonight!

My initial excuse for stalling the project (again) was that my sander broke. The layer of Velcro-ish stuff that sticks to the sandpaper fell off. It was really easy to glue back on, yet it was “broken” for more than a year. I bought extra-strong glue quite some time ago, meant to fix the sander, but I didn’t actually do it until a few weeks ago.

The other excuse is that I have no time. I really am pretty busy most of the time, but during the summer, we don’t have chorale rehearsals. I have a couple of evenings free each week.

The other day, I decided to get my butt back in gear. Rehearsals are starting soon; I’m almost out of free time!

Instead of blogging, reading magazines and/or watching TV on Wednesday night, I got to work. I finished sanding and started painting those three cabinets.

Right now, the second coat is drying, and the doors can go back up tomorrow. With only three doors left (of course, the biggest doors!), I hopefully will stay motivated.

Additional phases in this project will be replacing the floor and countertops … but I’m hiring someone to tackle those!