Linda and I visited Bunnings with our sample grout colour and chose a new colour for the entire kitchen area.

Eventually I might repaint the bathroom, but I don't have the heart for it at the moment.

I didn't manage to get out to site on Friday evening. Instead I arrived at 6.30 am Saturday morning and worked through to 8.30 pm.

Today I did a lot of unspectacular, hard slog, preparatory work for painting the kitchen.

The first job was to apply to base coat to the bathroom door.

I removed the door handle and latch first and then applied a coating of good quality oil based primer.

While this was drying I went on to installing the door frame between the kitchen and garage area.

This was a bit tricky because it had been made to take in to allowance the drop in floor level.

The upshot was that I needed to cut a notch out of the longer length.

I used the angle grinder and did a fairly reasonable job.

It took me a couple of hours to set up and install it level and parallel.

After that I gave it a coating of etch primer.

Next I went on to flushing joints.

Many of these were almost completed, or at least had the base coat done.

I am still finding it VERY hard work rubbing back the top coat in the corners.

A few places needed a second touch up with the top coat and I will have a small amount of rubbing back to do before I can start next week.

This process took me about 3 or 4 hours.

I was careful not to apply top coat in any area that will eventually be receiving tiles.

Now that the majority of the dust was finished for the street wall of the kitchen, I installed the temporary "corner tiles".

This is in fact two lengths of 10mm thick mdf cut to 150 mm height and bull nosed.

I have installed these instead of tiles because eventually a large part of this area will be taken up with the stair case and that is the time I will finalise the risers with the correct corner tiles.

Xavier did a wonderful job painting these Colour Bond Classic Cream but I will now need to go over them with the new kitchen wall colour.

After a little bit of flexible grouting at the bottom they came up looking very neat.

Then, again because I had finished creating dust for the day, I was able to apply the last coat of enamel coat to the bathroom door frame.

I spent 15 minutes carefully masking it off from the surrounding walls so that I would not mess up the acrylic paint coat.

Also, I have planned out how the new kitchen colour will run across the bathroom door - so parts of the frame need to be masked up so that "Classic Cream" is only applied to the surfaces seen from within the bathroom.

While I was at it, I also gave the back door frame its final coat - this was a real relief - it has been looking shabby and really annoying me for ages.

By now it was 6.00 pm.

I still wanted to make a bit more progress. Now that the garage door frame is fitted I was also able to cut of the last of the corner tiles needed to fit around this frame and glue them in position.