Over the past couple months we’ve slowly been working on a project that Nik bought while he was home over Christmas. We wanted something to put in our bland bathroom under the window to store bathroom items and towels. Our window is low in there, and finding something low and slim was challenging.
Here’s what Nik bought, and I can’t remember what he paid for it, but it was somewhere around $20 or $30.
It appeared to be made of wood, from looking at the bottom, so Nik stripped the paint and some very pretty wood was underneath:
We sanded this thing using our Mouse mini-sander, and then stained the outside with special walnut, and painted the inside with a dark gray-blue paint I had picked up off the clearance/mismatch rack at Lowes for $5. The feet were painted white – they stand out a lot on the linoleum now, but I think once we get our whiter tile in here I’ll like them more. If not, they’ll eventually get the gray paint too.
It makes our awful white bathroom look so much warmer, so I’m really happy with how it turned out.
This past weekend we spent painting the kitchen walls and priming cabinets…I’ll give you a sneak peek at the wall color. This paint almost killed me. We cut in with it first, to get all the edges around the ceilings and doors, and I hated it – it looked so dark, and almost purple-blue. Ugh. I was sure we’d end up having to buy new paint, and redoing the whole room. This was actually the paint we originally bought for our cabinet color, and on the practice cabinet door we had painted it looked totally different – a very pretty warm gray. But I insisted we give it a shot and do the whole wall anyway:
And once the whole wall was painted as opposed to just the edges, I loved it! It doesn’t look purple anymore, just crisp and fresh light gray. So weird how that can happen, but I’m relieved.
We also officially picked our cabinet paint, and despite obtaining approximately 500 paint chips, we (well, it was me to be more accurate) still couldn’t decide. We were between two colors, and there were things we liked about one and things we liked about the other. So we bought sample sizes and mixed them, and the result seemed perfect! So I marched into Lowe’s to get a gallon, and explained to the nice paint-mixer gentleman that his hundreds of colors were not enough selection for me, and I needed a custom gallon that was half one color and half of another. He laughed (I’m pretty sure he thought I was crazy) and told me no one had EVER asked him to do this. But, I know they can mix up quart sizes of colored paint, so I asked if he could tell the machine to add 2 quarts-worth of each color into the gallon can to result in the right color for a gallon. The guy was excited to see if this would actually work, and in the end the color match was nearly identical to our homemade 50/50 mix paint.
So what color scheme did we decide on? Well, Nik was insistent on getting some green in the kitchen, so we basically flipped our original color plans (gray cabinets, green walls) and the plan is now to do darker green cabinets with the light gray on the walls. We’ve named our custom green paint “Indecision Green.”
Once we get some actual cabinets painted and looking nice, I’ll show pictures of the color, but don’t hold your breath because this is the current disheveled state of our living room/cabinet progress…and this is only about a third of all the cabinets. I decided to go through the hassle of painting as much as I can inside where the humidity is lower to prevent tacky cabinets. So all these will get 2 coats of primer, and probably 2-3 coats of paint.
And I’ll leave you with this inspiration picture from Fixer Upper, in case you think we’re totally crazy, and have no faith that a green kitchen with wood floors can end up beautiful! 
rePhurbisheD 