Weekend update: my kitchen painting project

So much has happened in the past week! I've been too busy doing to write it all out until now.

The big deal is that hubby came home for a visit! I didn't tell the kids, and left late on Thursday night to pick him up from the airport. Their reactions when he went to wake them up on Friday morning were priceless!

After a walk-thru assessment of the house which he hadn't seen in 2 months, we made a weekend to-do list and headed to our favorite date spot, Lowes. Seriously, 3/4 of our date nights end up at Lowes after dinner!

Hubs' weekend project was removing the living room ceiling tiles, like I did in the hallway last week. His other project, unbeknownst to me, was convincing me to list the house before I was ready. More on that later.

I went to work updating light switches and outlets in the living room. Here's a  peek at the mess I was dealing with. Can you see those fabric-wrapped wires in the outlet box? Probably not, but I assure you that's what is in there!

My big project for the weekend was painting over the faux wood paneling in the kitchen. Of course, I don't have any actual "before" photos, but here are two random, real-life (aka messy and yes my dog eats his food out of an old saucepan and his current water bowl may or may not be a serving bowl with Christmas designs on it) pictures I found on my phone.

I chose Olympic's Sky Splash, which is the perfect neutral blue to accent the super clearance deal tiles I found for the backsplash (Style Selections Floriana Heather Subway Mosaic at only $1.99/ sheet!), all of which would look dreamy against the Fusion Mineral paint in Bedford which I chose to paint over the cabinets. 

 

Toss in an Ikea farmhouse sink and this is one swoon-worthy kitchen in the works!

I put the first coat of primer on and immediately yellow stains began bleeding through. So I switched over to a tinted primer for my second coat, but still had some pretty significant bleeds. Being the impatient person I am, I used the paint next because, hello, it is paint + primer. This went over much better, and after a second coat the only minor issue that I could see (and probably only because I painted and was looking for problems) was slight tinting in the grooves of the panels.

(an "after" picture will go here, eventually, when I remember to take one)