More kitchen!

Next kitchen project. This was in March of 2018. One of my favorite and most impactful projects. Let me start by explaining my family. We get together to work. My dad came to visit for 3 days... so we could work on my ceiling. (To be fair, we spent the following Christmas doing their kitchen ceiling the same way.) So let's begin in proper blogger style, with a before. Come on a journey with me, if you will. The ceiling is popcorn, there's a hole where the weird ceiling fan used to be in front of the sink...the only light is a 3 armed halogen fixture in the center of the room. (fan was removed prior to this project.) As a plus, you could point each light where you need it to be.... as a negative, it created a huge amount of heat.

The new ceiling is laminate flooring, because it's cheaper than real wood. I don't like the feeling of laminate underfoot (too smooth), but it's on the ceiling. A lot of my friends have asked me about this project... so I interpret that as "it looks good enough!" If you were to do this, I would advise that you look for a flooring that has a single plank print. That is, each plank of flooring is made to look like a single piece of wood. Some of the laminates available are printed so there's more than one piece of wood pictured on each plank. It makes it look less realistic to me. (So for each 6" wide plank, there might be 2 3" wide pieces of wood pictured. Problem is the seams never really disappear, (at least not on the ceiling!) so they give away the trick every time in my opinion. Here's a step by step: 1. locate your ceiling joists. You need to run planks perpendicular to the joists. We ran a chalk line along each joist so we would know where they are. you want your nails to go into a joist, not drywall. 2. begin at one side of the room and work across. make sure your seams don't line up. 3. We put a bead of liquid nails adhesive on the back of each plank and used a nail gun to put each plank up. Dad did most of the cutting for fitting around corners and the one ceiling vent. we used a table saw and a circular saw. Once we got started it went pretty quick!

once the ceiling was up, I installed some recessed LEDs, and a new pendant light fixture over the island:

We finished it off with some MDF 1x2s, built up to look like crown molding but with way simpler miter cuts!

Dad went home once the ceiling was done, but I had the whole week off, so i began the painting of the cabinets, which made a big difference!

Then i painted the island a brighter orange (Behr Emergency Zone).. and put on more dramatic hardware. It makes me think of Versace or Hermes. (pronounced ala Show Girls as ver-sace)

More stories to come! Paint colors: Cabinets are Behr color "Overcast" which is a nice middle blue based grey. (I don't like greys that go too brown, I definitely tend blue) Island is "Emergency zone" which is a shockingly bright orange... also indicative of my color taste. I don't do half anything! recessed lights are these SUPER thin LEDs sourced from amazon, they are so thin, you can actually install them under joist, they are no thicker than the drywall and hold them selves in place with spring arms. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0739KQ9M4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 The pendant light is from Ikea, it's called Ranarp: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/ranarp-pendant-lamp-black-10390956/