Experimental Paint Job With Cece Caldwell's Paint

So here it is, my painted guest bathroom vanity.  The bathroom still needs improvement, but I like it better than before.  This was just an experiment to see how the paint would adhere to my cabinets.  I want to paint my kitchen cabinets but I have a little dilemma which led me to seek out a different kind of paint.

I played around quite a bit and ended up using two products.  I played with two different whites and chose Simply White, not the Vintage White I have pictured above.

This is the hideous bathroom before.  This bathroom rarely gets used.  It is attached directly to our guest bedroom upstairs.  Eventually I'd like to change out the tile throughout and change the vanity top, and the light fixture and faucet.  Haha, once you start it's hard to stop, but it's at the bottom of the list of home improvements I'd like to make.

Here is the dilemma.  This makes me so mad!  See how there are two different grains of wood here?  To the left of the little line is real wood, to the right is laminate.  What the heck?!  What kind of builder does that?  I've lived in many houses and never had this before.  Even if my cabinets in the past have been builder grade oak, at least the entire frame was made out of real wood.  It's like this throughout my house.  The doors are real wood, part of the frame is wood and part of the frame is laminate.  You can't just paint laminate with regular paint.  Frustrating! 

Let the painting begin.  If you read any information about this paint most people say to just slap it on.  It doesn't matter how you apply it, with a brush, with a roller.  It is very, very forgiving however, if you want a perfectly smooth paint job, this might not be for you.  Usually, I don't have the patience to paint.  I don't like painting.  This paint was so easy though, I let my five year old try it... until she got paint on her feet and stepped on the tile.  The only prepping is masking off what you don't want painted and then just slap it on!  Pefecto!

I was trying to avoid the look of the door to the left, but I wanted to see what the waxes were like, there are two, clear and an aging wax.  The door to the left has the aging wax, which might look great on a different base color paint.  It's just not the look I want.  Ideally, I'd have bright white cabinets without distressing but I don't think I can get that look with this paint in the application I'm using.  The door on the right has Simply White painted and then sanded a little bit, and then the Satin Finish on top, no wax.  If I want painted white cabinets this type of paint is pretty much my only option.  At least I have options, right?

When I was done taking pictures this was the scene in my guest bedroom.  My husband keeps his clothes in this closet because our closet system in our master bedroom came off the wall, another builder fail!  Literally one day we walked in our closet and all of his clothes were on the floor.  He's looking for his shoe.  She's talking his ear off, while sitting in a basket on the floor of the closet.

I need more practice painting before I tackle my kitchen.  I might paint this armoire and put it my closet where my husbands clothes used to go.  We've decided it's better that way anyway, me having my own closet ;) I want to play around with the different colors available too.  Have any of you played with painting laminate furniture/cabinets before?

On a completely different note, my girl goes back to school on Monday, first day of kindergarten at a new school.  I'm excited for her and at the same time wish we had more time this summer.  After taking a break from pretty much all activities, I'm thankful that she'll have future summers off.  I think the best preparation I could have given her for kindergarten was this break we've had, to take a break and slow down a bit before starting a new chapter.  We traveled a ton during her break but in the down days between trips we spent many days hanging at home, not doing anything too exciting, she's changed and feel like she's ready to move forward and open to new things.

Hope you have a great weekend!