Hell Kitchen: Part One

Welcome to my humble kitchen.

It's nothing fabulous, but at least it's functional. Sometimes. The oven currently doesn't work. There was a three month dishwasher repair saga. The freezer isn't wide enough to store a frozen pizza.

At some point, I'd of course like to redo the kitchen and turn it into my dream kitchen, which is a vision I have yet to even conjure because it seems so far fetched. The kitchen remodel is on the 5-10 year to-do list, right up there with replacing the fence, converting the garage into an apartment, and achieving world peace.

This, by the way, leads me to ask myself, if we ever have the means to fix everything we wanted to fix in the house... wouldn't that suggest we have the means to get a newer, better house? So wouldn't we just say fuck it and move out?

But back to the matter at hand. What can I do to fix the kitchen for now? The short term solve: new paint.

Oddly, of all the painting I've done over the years, I've never actually had to paint a kitchen. There have been times I wanted to, but it always struck me as the worst room to paint. So many tiny hard to reach spaces, so much to cover with drop cloths and blue tape. Boy was I right. It's the worst! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

To begin at the beginning, let's talk about chefs, baby.

These are my wallpaper border chefs. They came with the house. They are fat and stupid and have stuck around for too long. I realize that's a really great set up to a joke. Probably politically motivated. But I don't have time to go there right now because I have work to do. 

I'd never worked with wallpaper before, mostly because I'd never had to. But also, it scared me. I'd never heard anyone relate a positive experience with wallpaper. When I finally I got up the courage and the energy to deal with mine, I had to stock up on some new devices, like a wallpaper scorer. 

Its little underbelly contains two rotating pokey blades. The idea is to rub it all over the wallpaper in circular motions, suffer the god awful squeaking sound it makes, and then apply wallpaper removing solution. The solution will seep into the little holes the scorer made and help the paper scrape off better.

So yeah that's the idea. In practice, the result was this:

The top layer (I didn't really think there were layers but it turned into that somehow) all but threw itself off the wall. But the bottom, the adhesive, the part that really mattered, hung on tightly.

I gave it another round of spray, waited twenty minutes, and then magic.

Isn't that the most satisfying piece of video you've seen in ages?

Goodbye, chefs. It's been real.