Part of my Ace Hardware Blogger duties this month included checking out their new paint studio–which is very boutique like with the slide out drawers of paint chips. Classy!–and trying out their new line of Valspar Optimus line they started carrying. Choosing what to paint wasn’t difficult, our kitchen cabinets have been on my list since we moved in and they moved to the top once we finished our floors and they turned even more bright orange.
When I went into our new store, they had a large display of a lot of colors and then pull out boutique drawers of swatches categorized by how you might want a room to feel. “Cozy up.” “Carefree fun.” “Luxe life.” “Serene Scene”–which is full of blues and sea glass and greens–where I was naturally drawn to first. Truthfully, I want our house to feel like all of those things, but the “Carefree fun” colors I immediately ruled out for the cabinets. They were bold and bright, without an ounce of neutral in them. I, maybe predictably, grabbed a bunch of whites, grays, greens, and blues and headed home to take a look at them within our space. After a couple days I narrowed 30 down to three.
Four Winds, Green-gray Linen, and Swiss Livery. Swiss Livery ended up being a little too close to the wall color so it got nixed and we were left with two. Originally, we were all for painting all the cabinets the Gray-green linen (perfect name for it) but our kitchen feels a little dark compared to the rest of the house so we resolved to paint the uppers Four Winds.
And the lowers that beautiful linen-like color.
But after we decided to use both hues, we had to figure out, “What about the island and the pantry and the cabinets that go down the side of the fridge?” Here’s a horrible, not accurately colored photoshop rendering of what we decided:
We’ll do all the uppers white and the cabinets going down the side of the fridge. The lowers, pantry and the island will be in the Green-Gray Linen. It felt the most balanced to us.
These aren’t our forever cabinets. In fact, they aren’t in very good shape. But, we know the power of paint and hope that this will give our kitchen the refresh it needs to tide us over for a full on kitchen remodel in the future. Maybe some new hardware (Greta has been climbing up the drawers and actually bending the knobs–gah!), definitely some new bar stools and over time we’ll update the appliances until our actual remodel.
We’re excited to get started, try out the new Valspar line and share with you our process in the coming days. You can get your paint on, too! This Saturday and Sunday, Ace Hardware is celebrating their new paint studio by having a huge buy one, get one free sale on their paints–incredible deal. Cabinet or room painting in your future, too?
We’re excited to be collaborating with Ace Hardware as a part of their Ace Blogger Panel this year. Ace has provided us with compensation and the paint to complete this project and we can’t wait to share with you our progress and our own opinions of the product in the future.
I really like the information provided in this article and I really like the way you have explained each and everything so well. Very well done with the article, hope that you will continue to do posting
I bought the Valspar® Optimus Paint from ACE. Can anyone help to know whether this paint is good for kitchen cabinets or not . Paint description says good for interior walls, ceiling.
Worked great for our cabinets!
We recently painted our cabinets a light color and we found tiny holes everywhere. We had to fill every single hole before we could continue (there were 100’s)! Be prepared to make a few fixes on the way!
[…] of paint–and removing our really low microwave and the surrounding cabinets helped, too. In this post, we discussed our paint scheme, but as a refresher we went with Valspar’s Four winds for the […]
I love this! I definitely took advantage of the sale weekend, we went for “Morning Downpour” for our cabinets, and “Wedding Cake” for trim elsewhere in our new house!
How are you liking Optimus? I’ll be interested to see how durable it is, and if it self-levels to the extent that Benjamin Moore Advance does. Thanks again!