Kitchen Refresh Part 3: Be Prepared For Anything
I didn’t make as much progress on the kitchen last week as I wanted to. Apparently real life can’t stop for labor-intensive DIY projects. Say what? Plus, the labor-intensive part of this project multiplied a little this week. Haha! Joke’s on me!
If I haven’t said it before, I will say it now. (And I will use some all-caps typing to drive home my point.) When you are doing ANYTHING to an older home be prepared for ANYTHING to happen. Seriously. There are all sorts of crazy things hiding behind the walls of your home just waiting for you to open them up. Then they jump out and yell “GOTCHA.”
So, this past week I spent a couple of hours sanding the soffit above our kitchen cabinets. Remember how I said I didn’t want to sand the soffit? Yeah. Well. I could not get the stickiness off of the soffit with deglosser or with paint thinner. So, sanding it was.
It took me three or four sheets of sandpaper to get that one section you see above smooth. Our kitchen is an “U” shape so then I moved to the long stretch to the right of the above cabinets. I was sanding along when I sanded a “hole” of sorts in the paint. Then I poked my finger in the hole. Just like a zit you can’t resist popping, I peeled that hole back and guess what I found?
Wallpaper. Stinking wallpaper.
I had gotten a little cocky with this kitchen. I was in my groove. I just needed time to get it all done. Then this. Wallpaper. My worst nightmare.
The good news is that the wallpaper peeled off in almost one continuous strip. It was pretty amazing actually. Or perhaps that was 37 coats of paint peeling off in one strip? Whatever.
It might explain the stickiness I found on the cabinets though if moisture had gotten under that wallpaper. What’s strange is with all of that sanding on the first section that I didn’t see a hint of wallpaper. It’s probably under there. I just have to decide if I go back and try and “find” it. Hmmm… When in doubt, refer back to Rule #1: do not go digging for trouble.
The really funny thing is that I don’t hate this wallpaper. It’s almost retro chic. Almost. Fortunately, it sanded off pretty easily and was adhered directly to a wood soffit, not drywall.
Remember how I sang the praises of our Ridgid sander
in one of my kitchen posts? Well, I still love it because it does suck up most of the dust when connected to our shop vac. However, we need a new pad on it. My husband assures me that’s why I sometimes have sandpaper slippage, which is really annoying.
He accidentally bought me sticky-back sandpaper sheets for the sander. In a turn of good luck, this type of sandpaper was super helpful and solved my slippage problem. However, when I tried to remove the sheet of sandpaper to put a new one on, this happened.
Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to use it on my kind of sander? There really weren’t any directions with the package. There wasn’t a “don’t do this or don’t use with that” message. Anyone else have this problem of not being able to easily remove the sticky-back sandpaper?
Anyway, hopefully I make more progress with the cabinets this week. The bottom cabinets are all painted. (Yes, I’m doing my happy dance for that bit of progress!) I’ve just been waiting a few days for them to really cure before we start using them. I’m also pondering hardware choices. What to keep, what to paint, what to switch out. The important stuff, obviously. 🙂
Thanks for reading! Here’s the conclusion to this kitchen story plus a few others!
Refinish a Dining Room Table Top
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