Mr. Classy Trash and I have a VERY eclectic sense of style. He is an artist and loves to draw traditional tattoo style art on canvas. I love to paint with bright colors. Meshing these two styles together in our home has become fun for both of us. We love to do anything out of the ordinary.
When we moved back to his home in Tulsa, he knew (and loved) that I was going to "girl up the place" a bit and the first thing on the list was the kitchen. He lived in the house as a single man for about 2 years and had his 20 year old son living with him for part of that time. Talk about a bachelor pad! Here's What the bar and cabinets looked like when we moved back here together.
Black bar...
...And black cabinets. They had to go!
You'll notice (if you haven't already) that I'm a wee bit obsessed with turquoise. I ended up talking him into a "muted turquoise" color and found Simply Seafoam by Valspar at Lowe's. Yes, I said seafoam. No, that's not turquoise.
At first Mr. Classy Trash hated it. I wasn't sure how I was going to pull this one off, but through painting another side table, he saw the wonders of dark wax. I sanded the bar front and cabinet doors back to show some of the black, then applied the dark wax and buffed.
We are both in love. It brightens up the room and is just the right amount of funk without being overpowering. We've also been able to pair our quirky thrift store and junk shop finds with it and pretty much anything goes. See that wood medallion thing in the middle of the bar front in the first picture? That was given to us by our neighbor as bare wood. We painted it red, distressed and dark waxed then decided that was a good home for it.
When we were in the middle of painting these lower cabinets, I received an email from Jessica of Brass Tacks Vintage asking if I would like to try a sample of American Paint Company's new product Hard Coat. I had just been saying that I needed to pick up some kind of top coat at least for our lower cabinets since our kitchen is a major high traffic area so her offer came at perfect timing. You only have to use a very thin coat so I was able to cover all of the cabinets and drawers then put a little extra around the handles of the ones we use the most. It's recommended that you apply the Hard Coat before you apply wax, but I had already waxed before receiving this from her so I went ahead with it anyway. It's been a week now and the Hard Coat and cabinets are holding up amazing. They've survived a four year old trying to climb up them with no damage and I have ran my nail over them to see if they would flake, but they didn't. What I love the most about this product is you can use any type of household cleaner on them with no damage. This is a low VOC instead of a no VOC product and is able to handle the chemicals in household cleaners. Great for families with kiddos!
So step one of our kitchen transformation is done! To see what's on our house to-do list click here. And please excuse the cell phone pictures until I get a big girl camera!
