Impulsive Kitchen Mini-Makeover

So...what do you do when your hubs in on the verge of a great challenge, your kids are away at camp, and you have about a million things on your to-do list?
You decide to "quickly" paint your base kitchen cabinets.
'Cause, you know, it's only the bottom cabinets, and that really isn't a lot, and it'll only take you a day or so, right?
Well.
Not.
However, not-what-I-expected still turned out beautifully.
I love, love, love white cabinets, and lightening and brightening is always our first goal in any home redo.  We're the people that paint all our trim white and put in extra windows, and never hang curtains.
Reality check.
I love to cook.
My teens love to cook.
We are messy.
Hmm....
Cooks+mess+white=gross cabinets
All.the.time.
After a few years of Spic-and-Span and magic eraser scrub-downs, I spotted the aforementioned inspiration photo:

 

Dreamy, but what if the red made my house too dark?
Too...red?
So I let myself get distracted and chose a shade of green from the same family as the wall color.
Slightly deeper, with a glaze on top--sure to be gorgeous.
We painted a small spot on one door, declared our choice brilliant, and went to Lowe's.
Lesson #1 in cabinet painting: use the WHOLE sample jar.
"Slightly deeper" turned out to be "much, much brighter", and that was so not lovely.
(A good blogger would have documented all this, but remember, this was an impulsive project.)
It was Big Red who convinced me after one cabinet section to switch to, well, red.
Lesson #2: Color looks different in Lowe's than it does at home.  Pray hard.

After agonizing in the paint section for a loonngg time, I took a deep breath, chose the one red that didn't seem to turn purple or orange under the light box thingie, and brought it home.
Success.

 

Told you to pray.
Lesson #3: The rainiest, stormiest week of the summer is not a good painting week.

Lesson#4: Even if the Lowe's guy tells you not to buy primer, you need primer.  I learned this four coats later.
Lesson#5: Stress=deliberately distressing four coats of paint.

Lesson#6: Messy cook happiness= deliberately distressed cabinets topped with mocha glaze.
("It'll look like melted chocolate ice cream poured over your cabinets," warned the Lowe's man. 
"Oh, goody," thought I,"it'll match the other drips.")
Kind of like buying flooring the color of your dirt, which is my best-ever decorating advice.

Notice that I didn't crop the counter mess out of this photo.  We really are messy cooks.

 The color doesn't suck the light out of the room and doesn't overwhelm my house with red.  It just fits.
Of course, this project makes me want to put a fresh coat (one coat)on the top cabinets, create some open shelving somewhere, etc.  So far I'm resisting the impulse.
What's your best impulsive project?
Be blessed today,

Ginger