Linda's Kitchen: Cabinets, Colors and Cooking

I had a great meeting with the nice folks at Ferguson's on Friday. I've never shopped for kitchen appliances for myself before and it's fun! Paul Gillis was my sales guy and we spent quite a while looking at various products and their features. My kitchen is tiny, so my appliances also need to be fairly modest.  I'll have more on that process in a future post once the final selections are made, but I wanted to share a few images from their showroom.

Here are some beautiful - and huge - Viking appliances. The red fridge is pretty eye catching, as is the double oven range. Those wouldn't even fit in my front door, let alone make it into my kitchen!!

 

Here is a refrigerator and freezer built into the cabinetry. I do love this look, I have to admit.

And, speaking of cabinetry. This weekend was basically D-Day when it came to painting my kitchen cabinets. After months of dithering and questioning myself - do I want black or green kitchen cabinets. Guess what I've decided on?

I decided on a very dark, nearly black, green. Once I started painting my cabinet insides with Farrow & Ball Cooking Apple Green it just felt right to go with a deep, dark green exterior. So, I headed off to the paint store and selected two possibilities - Ben Moore's Black Forest Green or Essex Green. These are part of their exterior trim line and should (hopefully!) be very durable for a kitchen cabinet.

Black Forest Green

Essex Green

Now, clearly these two colors are very close and this is where we start questioning ourselves. While I'd been planning on going black all along (after a short detour towards lighter green), I got chicken committing to the Black Forest Green, so ordered a quart of the Essex Green in semi-gloss. I got it home and opened the can and pretty much knew that there was too much green and too little black.  So, I started painting some of the cabinet box exteriors (we took all the doors off last week). And yes, as I feared, too green. Ah, what's a girl to do. Well, first, I texted Rob to find out what time he was going to be here today and then to tell him about the color. And then I decided to see what he thought and moved on to cleaning and de-glossing all the cabinet doors. That was a fun Saturday night...

So, today, in the light of day, the Essex Green was still significantly too green, but I decided to use it as a base coat for the cabinets and use the Black Forest Green as the top coat. It's my own personal formula. Well, it's an experiment.

Here's the lineup on cabinet doors on my deck with one coat of the Essex Green. I want a slightly aged look, although not too "shabby country". Once the paint was mostly dry, I sanded down the sheen with a fine steel wool, which also pulled off some of the paint. Next step will be a coat of the Black Forest. I'll then see how it's looking. I am thinking of a final step of waxing the cabinets.

On other fronts, we primed and painted the entire insides of the cabinets, both uppers and lowers today. A second coat is needed on the uppers and then the cabinet exteriors can be painted the dark green.

These home improvement projects really get me thinking about my dear Daddy.  As I wrote about him a couple of years ago on Father's Day, my Dad was the ultimate DIY guy. Growing up, I knew there were carpenters, electricians, painters and plumbers out in the world,  I'd just never met any because Dad did it all. So, when I tackle a multi-part project such as this kitchen makeover, I really miss him terribly. He would have loved this project and every time I think about cutting a corner, he's whispering in my ear - do it right! So, as I was ruining my manicure sanding my cabinets today, I knew that I was doing as I am told. And the end result will be better for it.



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