Kitchen Progress and a (Long) Story About Paint Colors

On Monday, I started a series of collected quotes and thoughts about growing older. So many of you had thoughtful things to contribute to this discussion. If you have not read this post and all of the comments, maybe you'd like to catch up? And feel free to add your own thoughts to the discussion! Then come back this next Monday for the another quote in the series.

Update on the kitchen: The new space where the wall oven once was is completed! It feels soooo good to have another project checked off the list.

Remember, it started like this  . . .

and then it looked like this . . . 

and now it looks like this!

See the difference in color? The microwave section is painted in the new color.

This is what we've come up with for the shelf under the microwave. The box on the left is a reproduction apple box, given to my dad by a salesman. (Daddy was a grocery store manager for many years.) Inside the box is my collection of my great-grandmother's cookbooks. On the right is an old mincemeat firkin that once belonged to Ron's grandfather. We store Pinky's canned cat food in the firkin. #hideuglystuff  

By the way, thanks to those of you who offered suggestions of what to put on the shelf. Many of you thought it would be a good place for cookbooks and I agree! The problem is that I have my "pretty" cookbooks in a wire basket on the bottom shelf of the island and we like how they look there. The other cookbooks (the ones that are not pretty, including a couple that have scorched spots where I laid them on a hot burner . . . yikes!) are not fit for adorning this shelf.

Who knows what you'll see there in the future! I am still thinking about baskets or more antique boxes. I have also considered cake pedestals or pitchers or a collection of dishes. I have been known to tweak. 😉

Speaking of tweaking . . . let's talk about that paint color, shall we? 

(Click away if you don't have time for a long paint story. No problem.)

Once upon a time (it hasn't even been two years ago!), we moved into Pineapple House and begin dreaming about updating the kitchen. Six months after moving in (and after painting the living room, dining room, and both girls' rooms), we began our very slow remodel of the kitchen.

Color #1 : Inspired

We peeled the wallpaper off the walls, and commenced to paint the walls and trim of the east and west ends of the kitchen (cabinets are between). We planned to paint the cabinets later on in the project, but they would be the same color as the trim so we carefully chose the color for this big job.

Bekah and I (Bek is my "house-y" partner. She loves house-dreaming. She was just a small girl when she started oohing and aahing over house plans and she'd pore for hours over the homes in Southern Living magazine. But back to my story . . . ) had fallen in love with a kitchen in Nora Murphy's online magazine and we thought that paint color would be perfect. It was Old White by Farrow and Ball. I sent for a sample can, tested out the color on the side of a cabinet, and we had the paint mixed. We painted the windows and doors, crown molding and baseboard. It had a hint of a greenish tone (I thought I had a stone/grayish off-white color), but I decided to embrace it and it was good. 

Color #2: A Happy Accident

I had learned to love Old White in our kitchen until Ron made the interior shutters for the windows. One evening, he hung the finished shutters and painted them. But the next morning, the shutters were a different color than the rest of the trim! Oh no!

What in the world had happened? Did the paint darken while it sat in the can? Did something happen to the paint to change its color? It was quite a mystery! We pondered and puzzed over what could have made the change. We were ready to take the paint back to the store and explain what had happened, hoping that they could shed some light on what had caused the change.

However, before (thankfully) we went to the store, it dawned on Ron what may have happened. He looked more carefully at the paint can and realized that he had picked up a can of exterior paint. It was not the kitchen paint at all. Rather, it was the paint for the trim on the outside of the house! Good grief.

But I liked the "new" color better. Oh no.

Color #3: Third Time's a Charm (OR Three Strikes and You're Out!)

Fast forward to about one year later. Ron was working on the new space for the microwave. He had to cut out a narrow strip of wood and add some molding to frame it out. As he sanded his work, the paint that was on the outside of this cabinet began to peel in huge pieces. Ugh. We knew that there was no way that we would be able to use this same paint to paint all of our kitchen cabinets. Cabinets get heavy use and we needed something super durable.

We were going to have to buy new paint. We decided that we would switch to Benjamin Moore which we had used on our cabinets at The Farmhouse. It had been a durable paint with a hard finish. 

Ron said, "I hope that they can match this color perfectly."

And I said, "Ummmm . . . "

Oh no.

The longer that I had lived with the beautiful sage-y grayish green on the trim, the less I could envision it on all of the cabinets. Cabinets are on both sides of our galley-style kitchen and that would be a lot of green. I imagined that we would grow tired of it after a while. And so . . . since we had to buy new paint anyway . . . I hesitatingly suggested that we get a different color. Then I quickly suggested that we just think about it. (The look on Ron's face made me suggest the "let's think about it" part.) 

In the end, we all decided that a change was in order. Ron confessed that he really didn't love the green anyway. If we were going to change colors, now was the time to do it. 

We chose Linen White by Olde Century Colors. At the Benjamin Moore dealer, it was difficult to color match so we went with one of their colors that was almost identical. The Ben Moore color is Kangaroo, but I just can't wrap my mind around a Kangaroo-colored kitchen, so I will hereafter refer to it as Linen White. 🤣😁

This week, we have been (re)painting the kitchen in Kangaroo Linen White. We hope to finish it on Saturday. That is, finish painting over the "happy accident" sage-y grayish green. 

This is only one of a number of paint stories in our history! Does anyone else have crazy paint stories . . . or is it just me?