Primer!

Today was primer day for the top cabinets.

Also, the doors came sooner than expected. Harkens back to the days with my ex!

One coat of primer

Kitchen... Loading...

Cabinets no more

New Year's Resolution: Kitchen

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas! It's time for me to start getting the Xmas stuff down, and that gets me thinking about getting back on track with this house. It's so easy to get distracted from the onset of fall, isn't it?

I think my next target is going to be a room that got a slight makeover, the kitchen.

We painted the walls a nice, neutral gray (from a 90's puke puce) and replaced the linoleum (what was left of it, a fake parquet wood linoleum), per the POS.

Glidden Pebble Gray and Armstrong Slate Sand & Sky

Those minor changes got the room looking presentable. I'm left with the cabinets and this vent thing above where we put the refrigerator.

It's supposed to be a vent for the oven but upon poking around upstairs, it has not one, but TWO 90 degree bends, and it's not powered! I've been itching since day 1 to take a sledgehammer to it and howdoyalike that, Guy got a sledgehammer for Christmas!

We also have a newer, smaller, deeper steel sink waiting to replace the old, shallow one. I'm torn on cabinetry. I'd love to suck it up and have a consultant come in, but in that world I'm also Princess of the unicorns.

Weird vent thing upper right.

Could I move around cabinetry I already have? I think it would like nice to put shorty cabinets over the fridge after that vent wall is knocked out. Then I need to think on countertops and cabinet colors. Accent lighting has to happen in here, too. There's no window by the sink!

Going with the {Color} Flow

You know that I have been stressing out about a living room color since December.

I painted the kitchen way back when in Glidden's "Pebble Grey" without much thought to the other colors in the house. In February we painted our bedroom a gorgeous teal, Color Place "Mysterious Ocean Fog".

Gray + teal = green in the living room, right?

Only I hated every green. Anything with too much blue looked far too close to my Mysterious Ocean Fog bedroom. My other options were a brownish green and a yellowish green.

I hate brown and the living room is already yellow.

Poor Guy. Every time I'd say, "yes, this is the color, let's pull the trigger," he'd come home the next night to a whole new set of color chips.

Last night my same saint of a husband found an incredibly useful website called Encycolorpedia

You put in a name of a paint, a hex code, whatever, and it gives you a WEALTH of information on the color. It even provides you with the closest paint colors by multiple manufacturers. Hell, it even gives you matching car colors!

Before we knew it, we were creating a color flow based on paint colors that were already on our walls. All we needed to do was find something that we liked that was "closely related" to our chosen color, which in this case, was our bedroom. The hex code of Mysterious Ocean Fog is #9db1b0

We were pleasantly surprised to see that our "oops" paint from Walmart in the back entrance hallway was strikingly close to Ash grey. Even moreso when we noticed our kitchen Paint, Pebble Grey, was a nearly identical match to Gray (x11 gray)!

That left us with a couple choices, while completely eliminating months of manually picking out greens we liked then grew to not like at all.

We tried Cambridge Blue, Pastel blue, and Cadet grey.

Benjamin Moore has a very nice color visualizer, and I recommend getting a well lit, high quality picture of your room (panorama, if you can) and uploading it there. Paint till you're blue in the face.

Cambridge Blue (Benjamin Moore "Appalachian Trail" / 633) was too minty.
Pastel blue (Benjamin Moore "Blue Stream" / 1668) was too light.

We clicked Cadet grey and grabbed the Benjamin Moore color "Comet" / 1628 and we really liked the look of it!

All along, we tried to put green in the living room to make the bedroom seem bluer, and we never though to go blue in the living room, and let the bedroom be the coastal green!

I'm excited to get some paint this week and get started. The woodwork needs just a touch up with my Behr high gloss white in there and it'll be finished.

Here's my color flow, I'm only missing colors for the office, bathroom and hallway.

May I Gush?

I'm tickled with the changes we're making at the Cape. I really am!

Over the weekend my mom saw that Big Lots was having a store-wide 20% off sale. After hitting up our local Sears Outlet and finding NOTHING in the way of washers and dryers that had decent prices, we decided we'd see if we could find some good deals at Big Lots. Lo and behold over in the hardware, they had Guard doorknobs (locking exterior and bed and bath), in Aged/Antique Bronze, for $8.00 a piece! Knock off 20% and that brought them down to $6.40 each.

I was thrilled! Not only are the polished brass knobs in the house dated, but not a one of them matches another.

I've only gotten the kitchen and entryway done as far as sanding, priming and painting goes. I love the kitchen in Glidden's Pebble Gray, and the white I'm putting on the woodwork brightens the place up substantially.

Have a look for yourself.

It's sooo late in the day, but I'll probably head over to the Cape and start sanding and priming the office's woodwork and perhaps the master bedroom, as well. I'm having a hard time moving today, and I've already downed a cuppa.

My First Strike on Natural Woodwork

Over the last few days I've been sanding and painting. My poor manicure just doesn't stand a chance.

I am happy to say though, that I have 2 coats on one half of the kitchen woodwork and my first coat on the other, which is also the living room entrance. Yay! Look closely and you'll see my new linoleum floor, too!

Before

After

The window and door, painted!

 I have 2 lights to replace that 90's white ones (with gold leaves!) that are currently hung in the kitchen.

 Guy and I got the new oven and fridge in, too!

This weekend we're going to go through and replace as many switches and outlets as we can while we have daylight.

 And I'd like to get the kitchen painted, as I've got the paint and supplies ready to go. See the paint on the bottom? It was just a little over $8 on the oops rack at Walmart. It's a perfect color for the back entrance/stairway into the basement.