I have about 10 varieties of hot peppers growing inside using the bubble method. I spent about a month experimenting with different ways of doing it, and have found out what works good for me. I have one 400 watt MH grow light that I started with. It costs me $200. I then purchased a PH / PPM meter / tester. I bought 2, 3 1/2, and 5 gallon buckets and lids. I also bought some grow baskets, and rock wool cubes. I started out killing pretty much everything except the hot pepper plants and Basil. I killed about 5 tomatoes plants before figuring it out. Basically I put only two 4" blue bubble stones per air pump Whisper 10-20-40 gal pumps. I check and keep the PH in the solution between 6.0 - 6.3 for most of my plants. I use about 200 ppm for new pepper plants, and 500 for new tomato plants. When the plants are about 1 foot tall, I increase the ppm on the peppers to 500, and 1000 for the Tomato. When the peppers start blooming, I increase the ppm to 1000 ppm. When the tomatoes start blooming I increase to 1500 ppm. When the pepper plants get over 2 foot tall and have lots of peppers on them, I increase the ppm of the solution to 1500 ppm, and tomatoes to 2500 - 3000 ppm. Having a lot of air bubbles makes the plant grow fast, the solution changes PH less, and the plant is much happier. One thing I noticed is that when both tomato and pepper plants are small they take a long time to form a good root system. Then once they get about 6" tall, they take off root wise. To make the small seedlings grow faster, when I place them in a 4x4x4 rock wool cube I cut a hole about 1 1/2" all the way through it. I then place the bubbler directly beneath the cube, instead of the bottom of the bucket. I now have about 10 pepper plants in various stages growing hydroponic. Several plants have dozens of peppers on them and the Jalape plant is growing the fastest of them all.

"Yes, many plants don't need insecticides but some definitely do." That's kind of an absolute statement, don't you think? I haven't used an insecticide on anything since 1996, and that includes indoors and out while gardening in both tropical and midwest climates. I have tropicals now that summer outdoors and come in for the winter and they get nothing aside from a strong blast of water or soaked in a bucket before I bring them in. I believe that it is more about prevention and observational skills than anything else. If you see scale or mealybugs while there are just a few of them it is easy to get them off. If you wait until there are swarms of the things it will be more difficult. I think the best plan for indoor plants is to place them in cache pots so you can switch them out easily if one gets too bedraggled or looses its appeal. Keep the less than perfect in another area until you get them back in shape. And all youse guys with 'disposable orchids' can send them to me! It pains me to think of plants being destroyed just because their blooming period is over.

Kitchens DO need an oil based sealing primer because even if you do all the right steps and clean the cabinets with TSP, scuff sand, and then prime with just a regular water based stain blocking primer, microscopic kitchen grease that is still left can bleed through. Especially in older kitchens that don't have proper ventilation. Grease gets into the pores of the wood where the finish has failed. Just like the pitch in knotty pine, water based primers just don't cut it here. Bleedthrough may not happen right away, but it WILL happen, and it will ruin your paint job. Painting is all about prep work, and there are no shortcuts to doing that right, despite what all the marketers would have you believe. And, I'd never recommend doing chalk paint anywhere in a kitchen, even if you are going to seal it with acrylic. That's still two coats of painting, and you might as well make that a coat of primer and a topcoat. The only thing you're skipping is the scuff sanding, and that's not at all onerous to do. You'll just end up with a better quality job if you use the right products for the right job and don't skimp on the labor portion either. If you want to minimize the labor, a HVLP sprayer as was suggested above will help you with that, but it does have a learning curve and requires a significant investment in equipment. However, I'm of the opinion that every single home needs to own a decent air compressor, because there are SO many things that you can do with it. Filling the kids float toys, blowing leaves off of the driveway, using a brad nailer to apply crown molding, using an air wrench to remove the lugs to change a tire, and the list could go on and on....

thank you all for the painting advice. i think i will bite the bullet and take it down, sand and spray again. my contractor is not gonna be happy... localeater, I ordered the light from a houzz marketplace vendor. But unfortunately, have had many issues, extremely long shipping delays, no direct vendor communication (all communication is delayed, done only thru houzz customer service relaying messages from vendor), then the whole color issue, plus more delays. i would recommend buying it elsewhere for faster resolution of potential issues (many places sell it). The light itself is from the Murray Feiss Botanic collection. It is very high quality, very heavy metal and the floral glass is really nice in person. I ordered the pewter, which came in an appropriately marked box, but inside it was their aged brass color, a very dark brown/black color. I have yet to see the aged pewter color in person, lol. I think this may be a manufacturing issue since they sent me the same light twice now. Here is a link below http://www.feiss.com/fa2481-pg1/Botanic-Lighting-Collection.htm