Kitchen magician

BEFORE

AFTER

We just had three rooms of our house painted. The dining room, the living room and the kitchen.  I have always wanted a yellow kitchen.  When we moved into our house, we did a lot of upgrades--pulled up all the pepto bismol pink carpeting (wall to frickin' wall, it was!) and had the wood floors refinished...  We re-carpeted the upstairs and painted the childrens' rooms, our room the hallways, playroom and the kitchen. 
What was funny about it was that I-along with my parents are of the 'get things done and get them done quickly' camp...while Tad-along with his parents are of the 'get things done properly and well no matter how long it takes' camp.  They were painting Coen's room deliberately and slow, vacuuming all the window wells and taping off the molding, while we were doing Lucy's room. No tape, no prep, just painting.  At that time, Lucy was actually in-utero--six months away from her birth into the world.  We had two weeks before the move in date and I was FREAKING out about getting all the work done to make it move-in ready.  Thus the no-tape no-fuss painting.  My sister, also pregnant at the time, showed up to see how things were coming along.  She walked into Lucy's room and saw us painting and said, "What?! You guys aren't taping the moldings? You're going to make a mess!"  I turned around and looked at her.  "Go join the Mainella camp!" I said.  Everyone laughed, while I explained to my sister what I meant.

Anyway, at that time, we didn't do the kitchen because the whole kitchen had these hand painted grapes all around the top and I didn't have the energy to get those covered up. So we left the grapes and matched the walls to the leaves.  We didn't do the dining or living room because both those rooms are stuccoed and it was too much of a task for the time we had.  Finally, as we're working on our house again, the living and dining room are freshly painted, and we got rid of the grapes.  And I got my yellow kitchen.  And I hired someone, who taped, vacuumed, and was done in two hours.  The best of both camps, I'd say!