Reno Your Kitchen With Just Paint(mostly)!

I purchased my first home recently and it is great fixer upper! While I have really ambitious plans for the kitchen (full gut and remodel), I wasn't quite ready to start that large of a project. But I also didn't want a dated kitchen when I host and have guests over! My plan: quickly do a few paint projects that will make a HUGE difference. The biggest updates included: scraping popcorn ceilings and repainting, repainting cabinets, painting Formica countertops, repainting headboard, and lastly repainting that ugly tile floor!!

There are many ways to remove a popcorn ceiling. I've used the water and scraper method before and it works okay. When I bought this house every ceiling had popcorn which I knew I had to remove! 😑 So I bought a Wen 9-in drywall sander that attaches to my shop vac and vacuums the dust as I sand. For $130, it's an awesome tool to use! I will say it's quite an arm workout, but with a lot of practice you can remove your popcorn ceilings with minimal dust and minimal skim coating required (to repair spots you sanded too much). I then just painted the ceiling.

This step is pretty self-explanatory. Since this isn't a permanent flip I decided to keep the cabinets as is. I gave them a light sanding and removed all of the doors and drawers. While I painted the base cabinets, my mother painted the doors and drawers in another room (Thanks mom!). I decided to go with a bold blue and white color scheme, I used Behr Starless Night for the blue on the cabinets and ultra white for everything else. Well latex paint is certainly easier to clean up, I used oil-based for all the walls and cabinets because it holds up a lot better and I still find it superior to any latex alternative. Since I didn't want to purchase a lot of hardware, I decided to keep the brushed brass hinges that were already on the cabinets. I removed them all and my mother cleaned them with some barkeepers friend. I purchased some modern brushed gold handles which matched the hinges to update all the cabinets! I think the result came out really great!

The original color scheme was brown and a pale faded yellow 🤢. The original square tile was 8-in orange tiles. All in all the kitchen looked very dated. The countertops were also a pale yellow Formica. Again since everything was temporary, I decided to risk it and paint both the floors and the countertops. I did a lot of research on what would be the best possible way to do this. What I decided to do was:
1) Lightly sand countertops and tile. You want the surface to have some roughness in order for the paint to better adhere.
2) I then wiped all the surfaces down, and then used a TSP cleaner to make sure they were absolutely dust free.
3) Next I used a special primer made for the best adhesion and applied it to the countertops and floors.

Now that the floors and countertops are ready, we have to paint them. I again used an oil-based paint Behr ultra white. I used to brush to get in all the grout grooves, and then went over everything with a roller. Although oil paint is fairly tough, I wanted a superior protection because of how high traffic these floors and countertops are. So I used a water-based polyurethane to topcoat. One thing I did learn from this experience is that polyurethane has a slight tint to it. Because I was using an ultra white it did fade the white a little (closer to eggshell) and had to worry about drips. In hindsight, white might not be the best color for this method, but if you really want white I would do it again. I did three coats of polyurethane on the floors and two coats on the countertop (Because visibly it was closer and the tint was more visible, I only did two coats on countertops). This can also be improved by doing lighter coats and not applying so much on the brush or roller.

I've now had the kitchen painted for a year, and I can say that I have no regrets! If you're looking for a quick way to improve a kitchen temporarily this is the method to use! I wouldn't paint floors and countertops if it was something permanent, but would highly recommend it if you're hating what you have! A year later and there's only a few dings in the floor where I dropped something heavy or metal and it penetrated the paint. The countertops I have had no issues, I'm just very careful not to put anything hot on them or cut directly on them. It is held up much better than I expected it to, and I plan to take a little paint and touch up the two or three dings in the floor.