Today I’m starting a new series: Kitchen Focus. Each month I’ll take one aspect of kitchen design and talk about my preferences and reasoning for choosing certain features. This week, I’m going to start with my green kitchen cabinets.
I didn’t have the money to completely replace the cabinets, so instead I researched how to do a cabinet reface myself (Home Depot’s cabinet refacing estimate came in around $11K which I thought was overpriced). The cabinets themselves were not in bad condition. They reach all the way to the ceiling, and there were no major flaws. But the doors had a cathedral arch design in the wood that dated them quite a bit.
I found a great company Cabinet Door World that will make new doors in whatever design you like in whatever material you like. I decided to stay with oak because I actually love seeing the wood grain, which would have disappeared behind paint if I had chosen maple. I ordered the oak doors with a raised panel.
My contractor who was painting the cabinets also recommended adding trim along with the bottom of the upper cabinet boxes to make them look higher end.
Finally I was trying to choose a color, I immediately thought I should play it safe and paint them white because I had a busy granite. It had strong yellow undertones with flecks of gold and brown. I thought white would be complement the existing countertop without competing.
But as I researched different shades of white, I saw more and more dark moody kitchens and deep down I knew that was what I ultimately wanted. I thought, ‘well maybe I paint them white now, and then someday I can save up for my dark kitchen’. But you know what? I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to settle for something that I knew wasn’t my first love. There’s nothing wrong with white kitchen cabinets, there are so many beautiful white kitchens out there. But I’ve always loved color. Even during the 2010s when gray ruled supreme, I used color in my home.
So I started researching colors that could be used with golden/brown granite countertops. And I discovered something, I COULD do color with my granite! Check out these beautiful kitchens below:
Both of these bloggers painted their cabinets green and had brown-ish granite countertops, and you know what? It looked GOOD. I decided to go for it. I started researching different greens, and I narrowed it down to the following:
Pewter Green
Thunderous
Jasper
I bought samples of the colors and painted it onto my upper cabinet doors to best see how they worked with the light.
I immediately ruled out Jasper because it was too dark and I was afraid it would just look black. That left Pewter Green and Thunderous. I couldn’t decide without taking other things into consideration: the new dark hardwood floors for example. I also picked out some beautiful marble backsplash from Lowe’s. Then I found some champagne bronze hardware that brought everything together. Although I ended up using a different design for my hardware, the color remained the same. Champagne bronze worked perfectly with every aspect.
After studying the two remaining colors throughout the day with changing light, I decided on Thunderous. It was a teeny bit more neutral than Pewter Green. At times it looked gray, other times it looked blue, and other times it looked sage. It really is a beautiful transformative color. Maybe someday I’ll look back and cringe at my green kitchen cabinets, but right now I’m absolutely loving it! I ended up changing my countertops down the line, my next kitchen focus topic will be on countertop materials.
