How’s everyone doing? We’re in recovery mode from a very eventful Disney trip around here (it involved a lot of fun, but also expensive emergency car repairs and….bedbugs! Not at Disney proper). It had been five years since our last Disney trip, and I’d forgotten how much I love it. Abe was four months old last time, so this was, essentially, his first trip, which was ADORABLE:

But now we’re home and ready to put the finishing touches on the downstairs bathroom. Before I turn to freaking out about how close we are to Halloween and Christmas already.

Before we left, we finally got the cabinets painted!

Before:

After:

This is not a how to paint cabinets sort of post. Rather, this is the post where I introduce the experiment we’re conducting, wherein we paint cabinets with minimal prep work and with the paint we happen to have on hand, and we see what happens.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not a huge fan of the style of these cabinet doors nor of the textured finish on the walls, so this was always meant to be an interim, inexpensive sort of bathroom makeover. What I’m getting at is that someday I’d like new cabinets or at least new cabinet doors in here, so I wasn’t that concerned with the perfect paint job right now.

And I already had most of a gallon of Hale Navy paint in satin, left over from painting the trim in the den. And gallons of Benjamin Moore paint can kill your cheap-o bathroom makeover budget pretty quick.

So instead of going out and buying special, super fancy paint that’s meant for cabinets, we bought some heavy duty primer (BIN shellac based) and used the paint we already had. The only prep work we did was washing the cabinets. Then a coat of primer and two coats of paint. All with brushes; we briefly considered breaking out the sprayer, but we don’t think it’s worth the hassle for such a relatively small job. I painted the boxes while Dave took the doors off and did them in the garage.

And…we’ll see! I’m going to add knobs to them all, partially because knobs are fun and partially because it will mean less of people sticking their hands all over them, so less chance of paint getting scraped off.

For now, I’m just enjoying how much I love having more Hale Navy in my life and hoping for the best.

And next week I should have a finished bathroom to show you! And a house fully decorated for Halloween!

ha–just kidding.