So maybe it wasn't that crazy

 the kitchen - before

When we first moved into our new apartment we were surprised that all the tile in the kitchen had been painted over. You'd have to be crazy to paint over tile, we thought. But sure enough, at some point the landlord hired a painter with a spray gun who painted the entire apartment (walls, ceilings, fixtures and everything) off-white. The only room to escape this whiteout was the bathroom, whose turquoise and black tiles gave us an idea of what to expect under the paint in the kitchen.

what we found

But maybe they weren't so crazy after all. When we started scraping the paint off the tile we discovered that before the great apartment whiteout, someone had tried to paint the tile in a checkerboard pattern with less than fabulous results. It appears that they started painting but never got very far and what they did do was pretty sloppy. The paint the would-be checkerboard painters used was very persistent and after hours of scrubbing and scraping it was easy to see why the landlord opted to just paint over it.

But that still doesn't explain painting the transom windows.