Fixing up the kitchen

This week, I had a new tile kitchen floor installed - which is 1000%  better than what I had before.  Apparently, I had corkboard and vinyl stickers (yeah, I don't know either.)

However, once the floor was installed, the new baseboard didn't match at all and I could finally see the wall behind the fridge and oven...and it needed to be painted.  Badly.

What you see is the decades of paint this house has been through.  Pink in the 1950's.  The super bright yellow chartreuse right in the "seam" of the wall is from the 1960's.  The I'm not sure if it's a sunny lime or a not yet ripe lemon from the 1970's makes up the majority of the wall in the left side of the photo.  I should also point out, this was after I cleaned the wall.  It was even scarier before that.   This is what was hiding behind my fridge and oven.

So, I went to my home goods thrift store, the Community Forklift, which is just a few miles down the road from me.  I wasn't looking for exact matches to anything - I wanted to see what they had.  I knew I wanted a "sandy" color for the background, a terracota color for the bricks, and a glossy tardis blue for the new baseboard.   (More on that later)

I amazingly found all three for $2.50 at the thrift store.  I was shocked to find the glossy tardis blue but extremely happy.  I figured terracotta and sandy were fairly normal colors.  

I already had plastic wrap, blue tape, and some brushes so, really, all I needed was the paint.
First, I painted the tricolored wall with the sandy paint.

It looks splotchy in the photo because I had just finished putting on the second coat.  At this point, it already looked WAY WAY better than it did before.  I could have left it there but I wanted something cool and something that, when I sell my house in a couple of months, others will think is nice.  ...Meaning I couldn't paint in an elven door or a Tardis.   Although the wall is pretty well hidden when you glance at the kitchen, it's not when you are doing dishes at the sink.

The next day, I taped off the bricks - which was a LOT easier than I expected.

Since this is behind the fridge and the oven, I didn't care about perfection.  Not all the lines are exactly the same but they are all close.  The "bricks" are supposed to be the same size as the panel ones for consistencies sake - 7 1/2" by 2 1/2".  Once I got the horizontal lines up - which involved measuring every 2 1/2"- I then started on the vertical.  Once you have the first two rows done, it's just about copying those all the way down - no more measuring!   Pretty simple and then you paint!

I am a very messy painter.  Even if a little bit of the paint ends up outside of the edges, it's no big deal with this faux paint - they are supposed to be bricks!   Bricks sometimes have little notches or there are places where the mortar just didn't quite cover.  It's fine.

I waited two hours - I only did one coat- and then ripped all the tape off the wall much to my pup's amusement.

You can just see Abby's tail and back at the bottom of the photo.   Like I said, it's not perfect, but it's far less visually abrasive than the paint colors of the 3rd quarter of the 20th century was.  I'm pretty sure this will blend in with what is up on the walls now (and I can't take off because they put the cabinets over it) and won't jar anyone doing the dishes.