Before & After

I keep forgetting to take "before" pictures when I do things to the house. When we first moved in, I painted all three bedrooms. Soon thereafter I replaced almost all the light fixtures. The only other big indoor project was painting the kitchen, and I've been putting that off for five months. I actually started about four months ago by peeling off the first layer of wallpaper. About six weeks ago I finally rented a steamer and got the rest of the first layer off. About a month ago I had a contractor come to give a bid on prepping the walls and painting. The bid was really high, but I was going to have him do it anyway. It's a big project, after all. After giving the bid and promising to call back, he appeared to drop off the face of the earth. The squirrel incident took a big chunk of my discretionary budget, so I finally decided to break down and just paint it myself.

The before picture is actually a "during" picture. The wallpaper at the top is what the whole room was covered in when we first moved in. It's a wine label pattern. Underneath that appeared to be the original wallpaper, a dizzying geometric pattern. Though orange has never been a favorite color of mine, I got it into my head that it would look really great in my kitchen. I'm not disappointed. I think it really warms it up. I did an exceptionally bad job. The walls really should have been prepped better, so if you come over just focus your attention elsewhere.