kitchen counters and cabinets (so clean and so fresh)

We have tons of work done on the house this month, to prepare it for selling.  None of it is terribly exciting blog fodder.  In fact, most of it has been repairing things to look exactly the same but not gross or broken.  Case in point, our kitchen counters.

Remember I discussed cleaning the latex paint off the counters myself, as it would have been a very cheap but interminably long and extensive DIY fix?  The material cost of doing this myself would have been less than $20 for paint stripper and new grout paint.  The time suck, however, would have been substantial.

I am SO GLAD I paid someone else to do this.  It took the contractor two full nine hour days to get all the paint off and re-stain the grout. He went at it with a razor, with a gas mask and powerful paint stripper, with some grinding thingy tool, and it generally seemed like a giant pain.  In fact, at 2 pm on the second day of a projected two day job, he said "I'm probably going to have to be here tomorrow too."  But he called his boss to tell him that, and the company sent two other people over to help him finish the job that day.

I considered 8 different colors of grout stain, and went with Antique White.

The grays and brown seemed too dark and grid-like.  The Bright White seemed like it would be dirty quickly.  The Antique White was almost exactly the color of the unstained grout, so we went with that (in the above picture the counter is unstained except for the  row of samples, so you can see that the unstained grout is pretty neutral.)

I'm sure it would have taken me months of weekends to do it myself, so I consider it money well spent. If you're wondering, we had a little less than 70 sq ft of counter and backsplash, and it cost $1250 to have the paint scraped off and the grout restained.  Our grout was actually in good shape--only two spots needed new grout--so they were simply cleaning and putting new color on, not digging out the grout and putting in new grout (that would have been more expensive).

We got estimates for putting in new granite counters, but even the cheapest, ugliest granite was over $8,000 for 70 sq ft.  Not only was the cost prohibitive, but I hate the idea of putting $8g of granite I don't like on top of kitchen cabinets that are not in the best of shape.  It seemed like a horrendous waste of resources.

This is the one job I wish we had done two years ago.  It looks so much better and now there isn't peeling paint in my food prep area.

I also spent a weekend painting the kitchen cabinets.  I sanded down the chipped spots, scrubbed everything down with TSP, cleaned them with q-tips (all those ridges and detail on the cabinets collect dust on an hourly basis), and slapped on a coat of primer.  I finished up with a coat of semi-gloss Dunn Edwards Whisper, which is the white paint used in every white surface in the house.

This is one of those jobs that took an entire weekend, and in pictures, looks exactly the same.

They look clean in person.

I'm getting close to done with repair projects.  I have a few painting projects left, a shower door to replace, carpeting to install, and two window treatments.  The one thing I am having difficulty getting done is repairing a 2x3 spot of our brick front walkway.  All the masonry/landscaping guys I have consulted have given estimates of about $1000, which I am willing to pay, and all of them have told me that they don't have time for such a small job.

I would like to live in this Naomi Campbell-esque world where I can turn down $1000 for a day's work.  Note to self, encourage my children to become bricklayers, as they apparently make a ton of money.