Behind every beautiful “after” photo is a hard-won lesson (or three). In this summer’s series, “Gutted,” renovators share the biggest mistakes they made on a recent project, how they fixed ’em, and more wisdom they gained along the way.
As soon as Texas-based DIYer Renee Bruner saw Kirsten Dunst’s kitchen in Architectural Digest, she knew exactly what color she’d paint her own. “It had all those really deep reds and purples and a very dramatic marble island,” recalls Bruner. “I loved everything about it because it blends old and new, which is what I try to do in my house.” After getting rid of her cockroach-infested cabinets, broken dishwasher, and peeling countertops, Bruner tediously applied Portola Paints’s Meritage Roman Clay to her kitchen walls. With a trowel in hand, she applied layer after layer of the plummy red plaster, going so far as to paint her outlets, too. That, she would quickly learn, was a serious mistake.
“I didn’t really want people to be staring at the outlets; I wanted them to look at the marble or the lighting,” Bruner says, revealing her thought process. “So I originally thought I would do exactly what I did in other rooms: When I don’t want something to stick out, I camouflage it by making it blend into whatever surface it is.” She’d seen others on social media paint right over their outlets, so she assumed she was in the clear. But when Bruner let her Instagram followers know what she’d done, she got a string of DMs pointing out that it was actually a safety hazard. If any bits of Roman Clay chipped off and got stuck inside the ports, it could spark a fire. She pivoted right away.
Bruner first tried searching for reddish purple outlets on the Internet, but nothing popped up. The closest hues to Meritage were shades of brown and black, so she bought five different outlets on Amazon to sample. Finally, she ordered six total brown outlets and one black outlet (for the island) through Legrand’s Amazon shop. They blended in perfectly.
Legrand Radiant GFCI Self Test Decorator Duplex Outlet, Amazon
$28
$15
“One of my favorite things about these GFCI outlets is that there isn’t a green light on all of the time, like on other brands. Instead, it only lights up if there is a problem,” says Bruner. Hoping to educate other first-time renovators, she revealed her fix via an Instagram Reel. And she has no shame about calling out her mistakes: Each one, she says, helps her become a better DIYer.
“Three years ago, I didn’t know how to do any of this. I make mistakes all the time, and you just learn how to push through them,” she says. “Then it actually feels attainable to people rather than this gate-kept thing, which is how I felt about renovation before I started doing it myself.”
