DIY Diaries: How to Renovate the Kitchen

I found this in my drafts folder the other night. A little background- with no DIY experience we decided on the kitchen as the best place to start our renovation. We should have probably picked something a little more straight forward such as a bedroom to start in. However, we have got to enjoy the new kitchen for the longest, and for that I am very thankful. And just for the record, we have yet to paint the kitchen window.

How to Renovate the Kitchen, in 29 simple steps.

1. You will strip the wallpaper off part of the hall, decide it's too hard and draw a mural instead. Everyone who comes to the house will love it. Your husband will hate it. The mural will not be happening.

2. You will get a quote for skim coating, work out the cost to do the whole house and decide to do it yourself.

3. You will go to Mitre 10 and meet Ken in the paint aisle. He will tell you the product you need is down the other end of the giant orange warehouse, in the section for Tradespeople Who Know What They're Doing.

3. You will strip the wallpaper in the kitchen and dining room, remove all the cupboards and fill up the holes with GIB 4 Plus. Fell smug at this point (who needs a professional?)

4. The GIB 4 plus will shrink and you will fill the holes up again.

5. The electrician will come and make more holes in the walls. So will the plumber.

6. You will go to Mitre 10 with a (girl)friend, and Ken will think you're a lesbian. Casually mention your husband.

7. Mitre 10 won't have the product the you tube video told you to get to fill the big holes the electrician made. Ken will tell you to use newspaper. You will go home and stuff newspaper into your walls, and cover it with GIB 4 Plus. Your husband will sand. You will vacuum.

8. Your husband will sand the holes you filled last night, and you will vacuum.

9. The holes you stuffed with newspaper and plastered over will not dry. You will pull soggy wads of newspaper out of the holes and decide to tile over them.

10. Write in the dust with your finger, you know you want to.

11. You will go to Mitre 10 and buy the ceiling paint with a pink tin from Ken. This paint will not be the one that goes on pink and dries white. It will just be white. This is fine because you got 2 for the price of 1.

12. You will be sick of sanding and prepping. You will mop the ceiling and call it done.

13. You will discover you hate mopping the ceiling even more than mopping the floor, and vow to do the floor more often.

14. You will lay the drop cloths and start painting. You husband will ask how you know if the paint won't stick. You will say you don't know.

15. In the morning you will say 'You will know that the paint is not sticking by the way it curls up it's toes and has little cracks in it. See, like here.' You will paint 4 more layers over it and then decide to tile over it.

16. You will discover a glue stain migrating through 5 layers of paint. You will put a shelf over it.

17. The ceiling that you didn't prepare properly will look really crappy. You will paint it 3 times, and declare it less crappy. It will do.

18. You will prime and seal the walls in the kitchen. The whole kitchen will be the whitest of whites. You will freak out that you will be living in that room from Charlie and Chocolate Factory where Mike Teevee gets shrunk when he travels across the airwaves. You have created the most sterile house ever.

19. You will cut in the 1/2 not-quite-white skirting colour to the white sealer/primer without tape and it will look fantastic. And not quite so sterile.

20. You will open the 1/4 not-quite-white wall paint and have a freakout because it looks the same as the 1/2 not-quite white paint. Your husband will pacify you that they are different. Be sceptical.

21. You will cut in the wall paint to the skirting paint without tape and it will look fantastic, you will be smug.

22. The walls and skirting will dry and you will convince yourself they are different colours.

23. You will cut in the red wall paint to the white wall paint and it will be a shambles. When you have finished painting the red wall you will tape it up and fix your apalling cutting in.

24. The kitchen installer will come (late) and assemble the new kitchen. They will have a made a drawer the wrong size, so they need to come back Monday to redo that section.

25. The plumber will come and mangle your beautiful gooseneck faucet. You will have him up about it. He will deny it. You will demand a new one. Later while he is installing the dishwasher he will stop huffing and puffing and apologise for the faucet. He will turn out to be a nice and funny guy after all.

26. You will not move in to your new kitchen on the weekend. But you will have running water. What an improvement!

27. The kitchen guys will come back on Monday. An hour after they said they would be there.

28. You will compare the paint colours to the paint chips. They are not different. They are both 1/4 not quite white. You will not care.

29.And let's face it, you will not mop the floor more often.