Now that the renters are buying Mom’s house, I won’t need to do any renovations there. Regardless, I continue to be transfixed by the before and after section of Apartment Therapy, specifically the kitchen renovations. I know I’ll never use the tips and tricks in my own home, because I will be one of those ladies who die at 90 and strangers will gush over my perfectly maintained late 1980’s ranch home.
The big tip that I see on 59% of the kitchen makeovers is painting the cabinets: one color for the upper cabinets and another for the lower.
I Googled to see how long that nonsense would hold up without dings and scratches. All I found was one designer gushing there were no nicks in his kitchen after … two years. I am not impressed.
Woodwork? Paint it. Brick fireplace? Paint it. Bathroom tile? Paint it. Ugh.
I’m going to keep following Apartment Therapy for the next twenty years until I read an article that begins “Joe and Jenny were thrilled with their late 20th century ranch house, except for their painted kitchen cabinets. With just some turpentine and elbow grease they were able to strip the cabinets down to the original Honey oak.”
4 responses to “Apartment Therapy”
YES. The answer is always “slap a coat of paint on it, no matter how impossible it will be to revert to the original gorgeous finish” and that drives me nuts, esp. for actual antique furniture that is solid, good wood. (I care less about knocked-together cheap stuff and also care less about veneered stuff or things where it’s definitely damaged. But noooo please don’t put a coat of this-year’s-color-next-year’s-out-of-style-color chalkboard paint on that carved wooden end table!)
Paint can last well, though, when you use the right paint; we had painted (enameled?) kitchen cabinets in one of our apartments, and they lasted well for over 6 years. But: gloss, not matte, and I don’t know what surface prep they used first, and also that kitchen was 60 years old, with three different paint colors showing if you looked behind the edges of the drawers. So. Mileage may vary if using modern normal wall paint, and fat chance on matte holding up to real kitchen use.
KC – the table I use for my oil paints was a 1950’s blond wood table that I painted with high-gloss cement paint 35 years ago. It is very chipped.
Did you pre-treat the table so the paint had something to grab onto, or did you leave the old finish on and just paint over it? (this has seemed to be the #1 problem with things I have had that have chipped: surface prep did not happen, sigh.)
KC – I seriously doubt that I pre-treated it. That makes sense.