Painting wood paneling- The den project

So we finished the hallway a little while back, as shown here. Three weeks ago we tackled the den and kitchen. Remember when the kitchen looked like this...

and the den looked like this...

notice wood paneling EVERYWHERE

Well a couple of weeks ago, we stopped procrastinating and jumped into this very large project. We were scared. It is the kitchen that we were talking about and that's the center hub of our lives. Putting the kitchen out of commission for at least a week was a scary idea. But we jumped.
We started out by ripping off all the wallpaper in the kitchen. We were lucky, it was old and the non-shiny kind so it didn't hold any stickiness of the wallpaper paste. It came right off, very different from the shiny kind in the bedrooms.
Then we patched, and sanded, and sanded, and sanded...

We moved all the furniture out before sanding...sanding took us about a week. So for about a week our kitchen and den looked like this:

Then we finally got to paint something. We painted the walls once with primer first. It didn't look good at this point. The stain from the wood paneling bled through.

See how the middle of each piece of wood is darker, there was more paint on the seems (because we used a small brush to get into them) and only used a roller for the panels... The stain bled through :(

But we kept going and did a second coat of primer. It still bled through a bit...we were pretty sad at the end of that day. We had no choice but to go on. We painted the ceiling next (we planned well so we wouldn't have to tape the ceiling line until the final painting.)
Then, after letting the primer completely dry and the ceiling dry, we taped and painted the walls. This was the next day. We were hoping the very complete drying of the primer would seal in the stain.

Alas! It worked. See the difference between the part that has been painted and the part that is still bled through primer. We painted the kitchen and den the same color as the hallway, Bermuda Sand by Valspar.

Shows the painted ceiling, the painted walls, mid tape pulling down and still a mess...

Now we pulled down tape for another week, every evening after work we would chip away at it. We finally cleaned everything up, and then, just because we are painfully perfectionist, we decided to give the wood floor a little spruce before returning the furniture.

See how shiny the floor is!

A few other things we did in there that I forgot to mention:
-sprayed the heaters with rust spray and painted them Bermuda Sand as well
-Sealed a few cracks in the ceiling, so far they have not re-emerged. Go us!
-Took down the 70s lamp/fan combo in the kitchen
That might be it... I might be forgetting. It was a pretty long experience but now we love it. Final after picture to come... Don't you love the suspense!  :p

Almost summer

School is winding down and summer is almost here. Of course, Bill doesn't get summer but we have a lot of fun things planned for this summer.

As far as our house lately, we've been very busy.Here's a teaser. more later.