Watching Paint Dry

  On goes the paint 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

After our Thursday night of less than happy couple time renovations, last night was perhaps a welcome split shift renovation evening. I come home from work and sanded all the drywall patches, cleaned up from that (man I hate drywall dust) and managed to get a coat of paint on the wall behind the stove/fridge before heading out to dinner. I then spent the rest of the evening in fabulous company eating a beautiful home cooked meal. I was in heaven.

Martin, who worked later than me, then came in for the second shift and managed to lay the very last square of floor tile as I rolled in the door from my dinner. Perfect timing.

The floor looks fantastic. Where you can see the bits of it not covered by drop clothes, paint cans, drywall mud and boxes of tools that is. But really, it looks awesome. It's a nice deep red colour, strong but not overwhelming and it looks nice against the wood floors it adjoins in the office and livingroom.

The walls are a slightly different story. They're a lot greener than blue -- I wanted a greenish blue -- and that lead me to a minor freakout as I envisioned a Christmas green and red kitchen. We also have particularly bad luck with greens in this house so I was a bit panicked as the first few strokes went on the wall. I decided to complete a full wall and then paint a few other spots around the room so I could wake up this morning and judge the colour in different lights. I'm most relieved to say that I actually really like it. And once we put in our white cupboards with wood counters I think it will look really lovely. Airy and warm and in kind of retro tones that fit the era of the house.

Now I've managed to paint one half of the kitchen this morning and am just waiting for it to dry so I can do a second coat. The other half needs further wall repair and sanding (from ripping out cupboards) and is a bit hard to get to with the one tonne stove and fridge pushed against the walls. If all goes well by tonight we'll have that wall prepped for paint tomorrow and the rest of the kitchen painted (save trim which I haven't really started to think about yet to be honest). Miss P will be arriving this afternoon as well and I'm hoping that tomorrow I can talk her into becoming an Ikea cabinet building helper. The dream of all dreams would be if we could also get the countertop and therefore the kitchen sink installed this weekend, but I'm not getting too set on that. At this point I'd happily wash dishes in the tub if we could make a cup of coffee and heat up a bowl of soup in the kitchen.