Throwback Thursday – A Painter’s Lament

Eight years ago we refreshed our kitchen. This house was a disaster when we bought it. That’s how we got a great deal on it! And the kitchen was useless, old, and gross. We replaced just about everything including the countertop. Derek knocked out a wall and his brother, Howie, created extra storage. In other words, we made it work. 

This is how it looked with the new countertop, before all of the doors were removed and redone and with the old flooring still in place. There was nothing structurally wrong with the doors. They were simply ugly. So we covered up the routed-out areas with thin wood strips to make shaker doors, and painted them all white – or so we thought. There were a couple of instances where Derek built new doors. For example, in the corner, that long, slim door was basically useless. It’s no longer there, replaced by new ones. 

We tend to gravitate to Benjamin Moore paints. They’re good quality and back when we were doing this project, they had a white kitchen cabinet paint that was designed to stand up to wear and tear, and not yellow. It suited the redone cabinets perfectly. Again, so we thought!

We needed a new microwave recently and the crisp white of it made the cabinets look tired and, frankly, yellow. Yellow? But this paint was guaranteed to not yellow! Back to Benny Moore I went and what do you know. They took that paint off the market because – you got it – it yellows. No paint, no guarantee. I don’t suppose it would have been practical for them to visit our home, and everyone else’s, and repaint the cabinets for us. But it would have been nice!

When I say yellow, I mean yellow! This shows the difference between the white primer and the state of a cabinet door.

So an entire repainting project is underway. I chose to do it myself, in stages, otherwise it’s overwhelming and difficult to get someone to adjust to my crazy schedule. Over the weekend, I finished the cabinets surrounding the fridge. I don’t mind painting the doors, it’s the areas around them that are no fun. Too many corners and angles. But the new paint looks so much better, I’ll probably spend every spare moment on this project. And if it yellows? Well, again, it’s guaranteed not to! But if it does, maybe I’ll just change the kitchen colour scheme to lemon.