We All Live in a Yellow Kitchen Scene

We spent this last weekend on our final (for now) painting project, the kitchen and powder room. The Kardashians couldn’t entertain us this time because we were tackling separate rooms, so we listened to the Beatles and the Pet Shop Boys instead, with me yelling from the powder room, “Is this song about drugs?”

Alec had the trickier job of painting all the hard-to-reach spots above the kitchen cabinets. Like on the right-hand side of this photo:

I just had to make sure not to drip paint on the toilet:

We moved everything from the kitchen countertops to the dining room table. Alec said we looked like subjects in that photo series where families around the world pose with all their food, except with a Hello Kitty toaster instead of comestibles. Maybe we just looked like we were having an indoor rummage sale.

We painted the rooms Benjamin Moore’s Harp Strings, which is a soft, buttery yellow. It made everything so happy, and complemented the woodwork, countertops and blacksplash. I was so pleased with the difference.

Kudos to Alec to painting above these cabinets. He managed to get in there with a long-handled radiator brush, which we had ordered for his office and ended up not using.

And here’s my handiwork in the powder room. We are working on adding a bit more to this room, so I’ll have additional photos later.

We ordered in from Leona’s to celebrate a hard day’s work and ate dinner while watching Community commentary tracks. I ordered a Caesar avocado wrap and it was enormous! I took a photo with a roll of tape (the closest object I had on hand) for scale.

That’s a wrap!

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And…We’re Back

Alec and I returned this weekend from our last trip of the holiday season (can I still call it the holiday season?), which kicked off with our Hong Kong/China vacation and ended with a week in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. We were away from home so much that we had to suspend our Fresh Picks produce deliveries for more than a month. We went shopping today for a full week of groceries – I’d practically forgotten what that feels like!

Now that we’re staying put for a few months, I’m excited to tackle a long-delayed list of projects. First up is painting Alec’s office, the dining room, the kitchen and the powder room. I had been researching colors for months and could have happily kept procrastinating, especially because paint names are so fun.

But Alec’s office was pretty urgent. All of his books are still on the floor and we can’t get shelves up until the walls get painted. I was also under deadline to spend a Benjamin Moore Groupon I had bought ages ago. So without further ado, here is the color for Alec’s office:

Benjamin Moore’s Manchester Tan, not to be confused with Gladstone Tan, Bennington Gray, Northampton Putty,  or any number of other tweedy-sounding paints.

The kitchen and powder room will be painted in Harp Strings, a neutral that has a little yellow and a little brown to coordinate with the kitchen’s wood trim and earthy tile backsplash and floors.

And lastly, the dining room will be painted in Summer Shower. This was the color that took the longest to decide on, as I wanted something that would coordinate with the green of the adjoining dining room. I was originally leaning toward hues with more green and gray in them, but then returned to a color that was more distinctly blue.

As paint novices, we were a little baffled by all the options you have for paint.

But the guy at the J.C. Licht store was very helpful, and we ultimately settled on the Natura line because it is no-VOC and I have enough dermatological issues without worrying about exposure to even more chemicals.

Alec is headed to Home Depot this week for primer and other supplies, and then we’ll be ready to go! It’s good to be home.

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