One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get the kitchen redecorated. We moved in to this house over 14 years ago, and the first thing we did was to get it re-wired throughout. That made a right mess, which meant that the whole house needed to be redecorated. But we couldn’t afford to do it all at once, so did each room as and when we had the time and money. The kitchen, however, was always a problem. We simply couldn’t face the disruption of having the kitchen out of action for an extended period. So it’s had a few face-lifts of the more visible parts, but hasn’t ever been properly decorated. There is also the issue that when we had the extension built a few years ago, we needed to bash through an external wall in the kitchen, which led to further desultory redecorating efforts in the vicinity of the new doorway.
The upshot of all this is that, for the past few years the kitchen has four different colours of skirting board (dark green, light green, white and brown), two different colour walls (cream and magnolia), two different colours on the ceiling (cream and white), the doors are either dark green or white, and I absolutely loathe the tiles on the splash-back! Plus the walls and ceiling are covered in two different patterns of wood-chip paper, both hideous. The rest of the house is so much better, and the kitchen really does look grotty in comparison. I’ve had a number of quotes over the past ten years to do the work, which is actually surprisingly affordable as I don’t want to change the kitchen cabinets or work-surfaces. But I still can’t face the disruption of not having a usable kitchen for nearly two weeks – which is what Rob my trusty decorator has estimated it will take.
I have however recently come up with a cunning plan, so I hope that I may be able to square the circle and get it done with minimum disruption.
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Redecorating is such a pain – today I painted the last section of picture-rail in the dining room, completing the redecoration we began over 3 years ago. We got most of it done ages ago, but it took until recently to get some matching picture-rail custom-made (to fill the gap left when we removed a cupboard). Would probably have been simpler to just replace ALL the existing picture-rail.
I once attended a student party where guests were each invited to bring a sampler paint pot and help paint a technicolour staircase.
The conclusion from this experiment was … DON’T TRY IT AT HOME!
I hope it’s as cunning as the plan made by Professor Fox, professor of Cunning at Oxford University!
I’m trying to come up with a plan for doing our entire downstairs (including some replastering and new ceilings) without moving out. I don’t think it can be done!
You could go away for a couple of weeks and get it done whilst you are away, if you know someone you could trust to keep an eye on the decorators.