Painting the Bead Board

 

Don’t you just love a weekend when you get a lot of things that have been sitting on your list finally done?  The weather here was not all that nice.  Kind of gloomy, cold, and rainy. But even still we were able to mulch two areas with pine needles… pine needles are very big down here in the South. We changed out the smoke detector batteries, light bulbs, cleaned the inside to the glass cover of the fireplace, watched mega amounts of March Madness Basketball (sorry Tarheels…it was a nice run while it lasted), and painted the bead board under the kitchen counter…Black. Yes, black!

    

When we moved in to this house about 10 years ago, we had the builder put bead board on the underside of the counter because I knew with kids it would take a beating there from their feet as they sat at the counter.  I was right.  It took a beating.  We painted it the same color as the wall and it was fine for many years but it was starting to really show wear and tear and starting to look grubby.  One weekend not too long ago my husband and I were out looking at some newly built homes in the area…peeking in the windows really…and I saw a counter area setup similar to what we had and it was painted black.  I loved it and knew that is what we needed to do.

I was also inspired by the FEARLESS use of the color black in my blog friend Melanie’s (From Southern Comfort in a Northern Life Blog) dining room. How gorgeous is this room? And look at that ceiling! And it’s only partially finished.  I can’t wait to see it when she is done.  When you get minute, stop by her blog and check it out.

   

Now back to the task at hand. I put my handsome husband to work.  We used a color called called “New Black” from Valspar in a semi-gloss finish that we found at Lowes.  It took two coats of paint to cover completely. 

We used a Latex paint.  I am hoping for the best as far as wear and tear.  But worst case if the paint starts to chip or scratch, we’ll just give it another coat of “New Black” in an oil based paint.  It was really a quick project. 

At first we did not paint the thin wood stain molding strip that is in place on the floor and when we removed the blue painter’s tape, it just didn’t look right.  So we re-taped and painted the thin strip of molding black so the black color went all the way to the floor. It made the counter look more substantial and finished looking and more like a piece of furniture if that makes any sense.  I really do love it. And now it’s time to recover the seats to the counter stools.  Did you see the fraying I’ve got going on in the first photo.  Embarrassing!!  :)