The time I painted the fridge green....

February is always a BUSY and celebratory month in our home.

Feb1st-we got THE phone call for our first two kiddos in 2011 on this day.

Feb 7th-Our kiddos came home, after a 2 day delay due to snow

Feb 14th-Valentines Day
Feb 24th-Baby Boy's birthday

Feb 25th-Peach Daddy's birthday

So imagine that plus hosting the Super Bowl Party for our church group, a baby shower for a co-worker and planning a double birthday for Baby Boy and his best bud, tour nights at school, ministry with NJHS, outings with friends and what seems to be a never ending ordeal to keep us at 2 running cars that can hold all 5 (sometimes 6) of us. Chaos doesn't even begin to describe our month.

However, its given me the bug. I get this bug about every other month...the redo everything in sight bug. Why? because I can....and because if it doesn't pan out the way I envisioned it, I just call it an artistic endeavor :).

So, this time I decided I was tired of looking at our boring white fridge. Its not fancy smancy stainless steel, it doesn't match our other black kitchen appliances and its huge.

We are also in the process of adding on a pantry to our kitchen, replacing all of the old cabinet doors, creating open shelving and overhauling our current bar with a big ole butcher block one in the middle of the space.....so once again the term came to my mind " you can't add chaos to chaos" and off I went into the artsy fartsy spaces of my mind to decide on a color.

I chose green, with a little bit of gray and a hint of blue in there.

It was actually quite simple....like almost so simple that I touch it as if its gold and any sudden movement around it may cause all the paint to instantly flake off.

I first removed ALL of the magnets, drawings, cards, calendars...this was by the far the most tedious step since I had to decide what to throw away and what was worth keeping on the new fridge.

Then I scrubbed the whole thing down with soapy water and a brillo pad, that part was a little disgusting, especially the closer I got to the floor and the farther back I got to where it has been hidden by cabinets.

I dried it off and made sure there weren't any grease spots. I would have sanded it lightly but the metal primer I was using said that it could on any surface without sanding first. Score.

After a good coat of tinted metal primer (i think the tint allowed me to get away with one coat instead of two) I let it dry for about 4 hours, which in my mind was 3.5 hours too long, sister has got other things to do!!!

Then I painted on my color which was a mixture of several latex paints that we had used in other parts of our home. I just made sure I had enough to cover it two solid times and then some to keep for touch ups. I used a roller for the bigger areas and then a small paintbrush for the detailed areas.

I put on two thin coats of the, shall we call it "seafoam green" and then let it dry through the night. 

After one coat of seafoam green it was pretty splotchy. The second coat worked magic!

Two days later I went over it with 2 thin coats of water based polycrylic. I wasn't too picky about it but did but thicker layers on the handles and area right underneath the ice and water spicket. 
The next day I took a clorox wipe and the little bit of a fingernail I have and wiped off any "oops" I had made. Easy peasy.

** Update-We hosted a baby shower and several of our friends from work were in attendance. They all loved it and wanted to know the steps. Those compliments alone gave me some solid relief that my desire to paint our fridge didn't come from the totally nutzo part of my artsy fartsy brain :). 

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