Roughin' Things Up

It's been so long since I have done a blog post I forgot how to use this new interface! Guess I need to start blogging more!

Well the house has come a loooong way since I took these pictures, so I will try to catch you up!

The first thing I wanted to do when we moved in was paint the cabinets....

They were a dark stain, and I just couldn't live with it. The living room walls are knotty pine and it opens to the kitchen. It was wood overload and I needed to break it up!

I decided to keep the existing cabinet pulls...they aren't exactly my favorite pulls in the world, but they will do for now.

We took out that old bar that was under the window (next photo)....

remember this one.......and it REALLY opened it up!

I wanted to paint the cabinets a blue color. I decided to use Annie Sloan chalk paint in Provence. I had not seen it on anything in person, just in photos. So I was really hoping that it was going to be what I wanted after spending all that money on it. If you have ever used her paint you know it is NOT cheap!

This is the actual paint swatch

This is after two coats of JUST paint. It looks really pale in this photo...it must have been the lighting. I bought the antiquing wax and regular wax to put on the cabinets. I tried in on the left cabinets in the photo above and HATED it!!! First of all it took way too long and my first child would have been born before I got through waxing all those cabinets, and second of all the antique wax was hideously ugly.  Ugly as in it looked like my house had caught on fire and the cabinets were covered in ashes. UGLY!

I couldn't live with that look so I scrubbed it all off and painted over it.  

It was still in progress when I took this photo

After I got my two coats on and they were completely dry, my awesome husband went around with sand paper and roughed the edges up for me. He did a pretty good job. I helped for about 5 minutes, then we determined that he was a better "antiquer" than me!

So while he roughed them up, I swept up all that dust. Luckily we hadn't moved in yet because that was a DUSTY mess!

You can see the difference here....the top cabinets have been "roughed up" and the lower ones have not been touched yet. After we finished this up, I sealed the cabinet with Minwax polyurethane.

That made them a richer shade of blue....which looks really good!

 The top coat made it closer to the shade on the paint swatch.

Next to go would be that sink!!!!! I will share that debacle with ya'll later in the week!