Faux Talent

So, if you recall, our kitchen walls have been a blazing red for the past 4 years (I may have posted about this recently. I'm still on the ancient computer, and it takes like a minute+ to load a page, so I'm not trolling through to see if I posted this already. Sorry.) since Rach and Mike kindly painted it red, my dream color, when I was pregnant with Charlotte. We all hated it almost immediately. Lesson: Red is not good on old plaster walls by do-it-yourselfers. Or in a tiny kitchen. Anyway...
A week or so ago, I finally bought primer because I couldn't take it anymore and I couldn't decide what color I wanted in there because all I could see was the RED on the walls. So on Friday, I primered away (2 coats of Zinsser, which wasn't too bad. Again, small kitchen).
Then on Saturday I went to Home Despot and grabbed the paints we decided on - from Behr's "Bellagio Faux" fancy pants technique section - we went with a top color of "Roman Sun," a warm yellow over a barely off-white. Then I painted the base color, and had to wait for it to dry, and we went to my cousin's kid's birthday party, and I thought, "Well, when I get home I'll just hammer through the topcoat and then it'll look nice when Mike's folks come over for Father's Day." thinking it wouldn't, it couldn't, take that long because, again! Tiny Kitchen!
Well...didn't get home from the party until like 9:30. And then started. And finished at FOUR FIFTEEN AM. EEK! Oh well. I think it looks great, but am sure I'll start to hate it and notice all the places I slacked over the next few days. (We all know I like to slack...you know there's a spot of the backsplash where I miscut the tiles, but had returned the wet saw and so there's just a space in the corner behind the sink with no tile border. eh.)
Verdict: I really like how it looks, and if you have two people doing it it would go super quickly. Or just realize that it will be a nice weekend project. The top coat has little microbeads of white paint in it, so you paint it on in little Xes, and then let it dry a little (15 minutes) and then go back and use this rounded trowel to kind of "pop" the microbeads and spread out the white for the faux effect.
I think that next week I'm going to get new flooring - just the peel-n-stick tiles - for the kitchen. I've heard great things and LOVE how Rach's look in her and Neil's kitchen. Because if I do these things, then we'll finally start eating dinner every night in the kitchen! RIGHT!
Pics below:
The main wall, before (See picture of Charlotte on the horse)
And after

Flickr album: