Sunny Day Real Estate (projects)

(Before we start off, the title of this post is a little twist on the name of a band I was really into in junior high and early high school. They were a seminal emo band in the '90s, before emo got the terrible connotation that it has now. And, what can I say? It was perfect for an angsty teenager sulking away in her rural, Midwestern hometown).

The weather was amazing in Milwaukee last weekend - we're talking warm, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky, low-humidity weather. It was gorgeous.


Of course, as luck would have it, we planned on painting our kitchen cabinets over the weekend. This was before we were aware it was going to be incredible outside. But, as we've quickly learned, sometimes being a homeowners means putting housework before playtime.


So, after squeezing in a long bike ride in the morning (gotta have some fun, right?), we took our 32040520578th trip to Home Depot since becoming homeowners not even a month ago. We picked out some "Pure White" by Behr enamel and more brushes and quickly got home to put ourselves to work.


But how can you possibly confine yourself indoors when it looks like this outside?

That wasn't going to happen.


So, Eric went out to the recycling bin and collected a few of the 10,000 pieces of cardboard we've set out there in the past three weeks. He ripped them up and strategically placed them outside.

Where we set out our cabinet doors for priming.

Priming the doors outside made the process just a bit more enjoyable. We primed the fronts, went inside to prime all the wall cabinets, and then flipped all the doors over to prime the back. And got a little Vitamin D in the process. Not too shabby!

After everything was primed, we'd gotten a little tired of painting and decided to give it a rest. We'd already been working for a few hours and weren't in any rush to get these cabinets finished, so we thought we might as well take advantage of the comfortable evening.

I cleaned up and then went right to work in the kitchen. After being in the sun and working all day, we were both craving something cool and light.

Something like this delicious black bean, quinoa and citrus salad.

This is the perfect summer salad - really refreshing, but has enough heft to actually fill you up. It also makes for a delicious dip with tortilla chips.

And let's talk about that Wild Blue Blueberry Lager you can see pictured above. I saw this beer and was instantly intrigued; I'd tried blueberry ale before, but was really interested to see what this one was like. At 8% ABV, this lager was not messing around. It also seemed a little too thick for my liking, and the blueberry was more intense than I was hoping. This is a beer where you stop at one. Or, if you'r Eric, you stop at two sips and pass it off to your girlfriend. We will not be purchasing this beer again.

But try everything once, am I right?

The next day, we actually made ourselves work inside the majority of the day. We brought the doors inside for the actual painting process, and slapped three coats on the wall cabinets and the doors themselves. It was a long, tedious process.... and we're still not done. After giving the doors ample time to set, we're finally finishing the backs of the doors tonight - then we can finally set the paint brushes down!

When painting cabinets, it's extremely important to let the paint set completely before attaching the doors back to the cabinets. In fact, though all the painting will be done tonight, we don't intend on drilling everything back into place until Sunday. We don't want any accidental fingerprints, bunching or globbing going on in our cabinets. It's best just to play it safe.

I can't wait to show you the before and after! Heck, I can't wait to see the after myself! But I can already see a difference in our sparkling white cabinets on the walls. It's really going to make the kitchen feel like a brand new place!