I called Kirsten at home when I was in BC for Aunt Mi's funeral, and she started the conversation with "I have good news and bad news... the good news is that I started taking off wallpaper [we had agreed that our next house project was going to be repainting the basement and putting up a wall to create a new bedroom/office down there]... the bad news is that it's in the kitchen."

And so it began, our kitchen renovation.

The original plan was to strip the wallpaper off the walls (turns out there was three layers), repair some cracks on the ceiling, and repaint the cabinet doors. We're not going to replace the flooring yet, nor are we going to move things around and get new cabinets (as much as we really want to).

Of course, then Kirsten tried to remove some bad plaster from the ceiling and discovered that they'd painted latex over oil paint on the ceiling. It chipped happily off for feet.

So, we had to make a decision. Should we invest the time to properly remove ALL the paint on the ceiling, plaster it, prime it, and paint it? Or should we instead put up a panelled ceiling? In the end, we chose to create a panelled ceiling using painted tongue and groove pine.

Here's an old shot of the original kitchen:

As I mentioned before, we wanted to put up a panelled ceiling using T&G bead board. It was a bit of a pain in the arse, since we had to cross the ceiling 3 1/2 " at a time, but over all it was well worth it. Here, you see me nailing a piece into the corner. The clamp is there to hold the board up while I work.

This is the "finished" shot. We still have to paint the boards, but this gives you an idea of what the finished ceiling will look like. It also shows the new light fixture for the kitchen, which we got from Ikea last night (after a literal quest to find lighting we liked at Rona, Canadian Tire, and two Home Depots).

There's still some work to be done, of course. We have to repaint the cabinet doors, replace the handles on them, paint the walls (Behr's Chocolate Froth 720C-2, which we'll carry through to the basement) and the trim (Behr's Snow Fall W-F-600). We're also going to repair the end of what we officially call "the jutty outy bit" of the counter top by placing a chromed strip across the top and edge and affixing a towel bar to it.