My apartment is not the easiest to renovate. The building I live in predates Columbus and was apparently designed freehand, so your standard measuring tape is somewhat useless. I am not kidding when I say that I think the kitchen and bathroom used to be the same room. The two are divided by a warped wall that props up a sinking ceiling, leaving the kitchen side so narrow that the refrigerator doesn't fit--it sits in my living room. The kitchen was clearly built before the invention of the frigidaire; there are two small doors in the walls that have been sealed shut with a thousand years' worth of paint, and I believe at least one of them once served as an icebox.
There is also the issue of the window. The surrealist architect who threw together this building did the windows last, and as a result there are several of them jammed into corners at odd angles and held in place with expansion foam. The kitchen window leads out onto a fire escape, and it's blocked by the dirtiest safety grate in New York. The grate is too ugly for polite company, so I covered it with a curtain. To compensate for the lack of natural light, I painted the room in Toasted Hazelnut. This was the result:
Horrible, right? I mean, the orange was problematic, but then I went and accessorized with a stiff, shiny brown curtain, and I completely ruined everything. That kitchen was the bane of my existence, the humpbacked uncle at every house party that made all my friends smile awkwardly and avert their eyes.
So I finally decided to fix it. I was in the middle of a kitchen deep clean anyhow, since the cockroach population was getting wildly out of hand and the dishes were dirty (this was due to a leak in the ceiling that soaks only the underside of the bottom shelf of my cabinets. The physics of this are complicated but I can do my best to explain if you really want to know). So I did a bit of googling for stencils and I found this pattern for Moroccan painted wallpaper from Jones Design Company.
Simple! Tedious! Time-consuming! My favorite things. I downloaded the stencil and got to getting.
You can see from the photo that my lines are somewhat janky. A bit of jankiness, I learned, is totally manageable when one is tracing pencil lines across the edge of a carved-up shoebox lid. But the fine line between a bit and a lot is easily broached by the preemptive celebratory bottle of wine, and that level of jankiness can lead to hours of erasing. Not advised.
Once I'd traced the shape a hundred billion times, I got set up to paint. For my detailing I chose Sunset Nude, because it sounded sexy. Painting took less time than stenciling, and it was a lot more rewarding. My ceilings are high and I come from a long line of carnie dwarfs, so I spent the bulk of my time teetering at the top of a stepladder padded with dictionaries. Being up that high gave me an interesting vantage point, and I saw a couple things about my kitchen that I'd never noticed before. Here is one of them.
OH HEY DO YOU THINK THAT MIGHT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH MY COCKROACH PROBLEM? Are you kidding me, Surrealist Architect? How lazy can you get? Here I am dealing with bugs on a squash-by-squash basis, and it turns out I'm a safe house on the cockroach underground railroad because some jagoff was too lazy to nail a board to the wall. This hole was on top of my cabinet and it was TWO FEET LONG. And there were two of them.
I boarded up both holes with plywood and expansion-foamed them until the space above my cabinets looked like a marshmallow wonderland. Then I went back to my Moroccan wallpaper. And nine hundred years later, I was finished.

All told, I'm really happy with the way it came out. The room looks a lot cleaner and brighter, and burning that brown curtain was well worth the court summons. It was certainly not a difficult project, but it was impressively time-consuming. My kitchen is the size of a bus shelter and it still took me the full weekend to complete (and I skipped a wall). The price tag, though, was unbeatable. The stencil was free and the cashier at Lowe's forgot to charge me for the paint, so all I really paid for were brushes and a curtain. And the expansion foam, which was worth every last penny. I can hear the little bugs skritching against my walls and weeping in despair in the darkness, and I just raise my cup of mint tea in my Moroccan palace and I laugh and laugh and laugh.
