First Coat

I've finally finished the first coat on the tiles!  I feel like the end is much closer now ...

The white is sort of freaking me out because it looks so cold somehow.  But once I'm done, I might change the lighting to something warmer.  Or maybe I'll just adapt.  :)

I've been using a small foam roller and it's taken nearly one whole can of the Plastikote tile paint, so it looks like the two tins I bought are just going to make it.  Assuming a third coat isn't needed; it's quite streaky and patchy, but I hope the second coat will sort things out.

Fingers crossed...

WD40 4eva!

Wow, so here's something I wouldn't have believed....

Where my vanity sat against the tiled wall, there was the biggest, deepest strip of silicone I've ever seen (ok, yes, I put it there a few years ago) which had to be removed before I paint the tiles on that wall.

And for the last few days I have been scraping at it and picking at it and cutting it and gouging it and painting chemicals on it - anything to make it budge.  But no go.  I'd managed to get little chunks and slivers off the top, but the thing was stuck, well and truly.

So this morning, I just thought, "why not?" and doused it with WD40.  After 10 minutes I gave it a little prod and woah!  The whole strip just lifted out with zero effort!  I swear there is nothing that WD40 cannot do.

Here's the offending strip of sililcone...

And here's the lovely, beautiful, wonderful empty gap left behind ...

So now, it's onward with the painting.  :)

Next stop...bathroom

After the kitchen, I knew I wanted to pull up the lino.  In the same way that the benchtop made the cabinets look shabby, the finished cabinets made the floor look shabby.  And under that old lino are unfinished, beautiful jarrah floorboards.  There is no way I can afford to have someone come and do them, but am dying to have a go myself.

But I was so excited about the kitchen, I decided I would like to update my bathroom too.  And then maybe the bedrooms...  And wherever else I end up, the floorboards will have to be last.

So now I'm onto the bathroom.  It's pretty disgusting.  The tiles and tub are that horrible '70's pink, the shower screen is cracked, and the corner of the tub is rusty.

So the first thing was to remove that shower screen.  I want to recoat the bathtub, and seeing as the screen is attached directly to it, it had to go.  Plus I needed to be able to get to that rust spot before I paint.

It took some serious effort and much WD40 (is there anything WD40 can't do?), but finally it was gone.  Who knew these things weighed so much?

And what a horrible surprise to find that all the aluminium fixings and silicone were hiding a much worse rust situation that I had originally thought.  Bleh.

I asked a friend for advice and he offered to lend me his angle grinder, but I was so worried there wouldn't be any clean metal left under all that rust.  It was pretty crunchy.

But the angle grinder wasn't coming for a week, so I decided to paint the walls first.  After finally deciding on Silver Sage (a Taubmans colour) it took me a few days of cleaning and painting, but I got it done.  At first, I had another small panic attack, thinking that I had made a big mistake with the colour, but I now feel ok about it.  It's just the contrast with the old pink that looks awful.  Once the tiles are white, I feel it will look good.

After the walls, I got the angle grinder and after experimenting with different disks, I got the bath done with a twistwire cup disk.  I've never used an angle grinder before and it scared me a bit, plus it was stinky, smelly, and really hard work, especially with the plethora of safety gear I had to wear.  With heavy clothes, gloves, boots, ear muffs, full face mask and dust mask, I still managed to get little burns on my arms and ringing ears.

But, despite all this whinging, I feel ok with the result:

Ok, it still looks pretty awful, but I'm pretty sure all the rust is gone and I am down to clean metal.  I painted it over with Rust Converter anyway, just to be sure.

And that's where I'm at now.  Next step will be to paint the tiles with tile paint - I chose Plastikote because you don't need to prime and it was cheaper than the alternative.  I don't think it's really meant to be used in shower recesses, but we'll see.  Then paint the tub and touch up the cornices with ceiling paint.

So stay tuned and I'll post more pics when I'm done.  :)

It all began with the benchtop

Hey there!

So I've never written a blog before, but I figured that it was time to start doing some sharing.

It all started a month ago - I had a week off from work and was trying to make sure I had a project to keep me busy.  For a while I'd been thinking about resurfacing my kitchen benchtop, but had put it off.  I rent the house and even though the landlord doesn't really mind what I do, I still wasn't ready to commit to big changes.

But then a friend started renovating his kitchen and I suddenly caught the reno bug!

After some serious research, I decided to use Giani Granite Paint in the Chocolate Brown kit.  I ordered it online, then, while I was waiting for it to arrive, I got some acrylic paints and bits of cardboard and practiced and practiced and practiced and kept on practicing.

To be honest, I wasn't really happy with any of the practice pieces, but by the time my week off arrived, I decided I had to just do it for real.

Here's my kitchen bench before I started.

 Then after the primer - wow, this was scary!  Totally past the point of no return once you start seeing that black going on!

 Then, after applying the chocolate brown paints.  Those veins just sort of happened.  I didn't really have a plan, but I was pretty pleased with the result.

Then after the topcoat.  This made me even happier because it toned everything down a little and seemed to make it feel more blended somehow.  Awesome.  And who can resist that lovely mirror finish?

Here's a link to the faux granite paint I used:   http://gianigranitepaint.com.au/

So you may notice with the last photo, apart from Molly's dinner being included, the cabinet doors are different.  I didn't start out with any intention to do them, but when I looked at how good the benchtops came out, the old cabinet doors just looked so shabby in comparison.  And seeing as I had the week off, and the benchtops were done in one day, I thought, "why not?"

So I started a mission to update them too.  One by one, I took each door off, sanded, cleaned, filled holes from the removed handles, added wooden trim, painted, then added new handles.  I really like them now!  It was hard getting them back on with the extra thickness added from the trim, but after much hinge fiddling, I got there in the end.  And absolutely love them.

This was the first door I completed, before the handle:

(I know the floor looks pretty feral, but I refused to clean it until after I had finished working in there.)

I managed to finish all the lower cabinets in my week off, but it took another 3 weekends to finish all the overheads.  Two of the middle doors I decided to not put back on - it took me so long to finish, that I kind of fell in love with having open shelving over the bench.  So I moved my plates and glasses in there and now it seems like a feature.  :)

The finishing touches were the Ikea rails bolted underneath the cabinets to hang my pots and an Ikea magnetic knife rack on the wall (sorry, not in this photo).