Kitchen snowballs.

In true "if you give a mouse a cookie" fashion, my kitchen cabinet project has mushroomed into something a little more complicated. Not terribly complicated, but I can't start working on it just yet.

I was inspecting the cabinets and realized that, like the vanitites in the bathrooms, the countertop sort of wraps around and covers the top inch or so of the cabinet. Which means that the countertop really needs to come off before I start painting. (Otherwise, there's a ridge of paint that you have to sand and then you have to prime and paint that dumb little unfinished gap once the countertop does come off--annoying.)

I was going to start on the bar as sort of an appetizer before tackling the main course of big cabinets. So should we pull off the bar countertop so I can paint before finding a countertop, since it could take a number of weeks to get one in? No. We need to look at countertops now, so I can paint while we wait for it to come in.

I also found some cabinet doors at the Benjamin Moore store that I really liked, and took Todd in to see if he thought he could reproduce them. But since we were there anyway, we had the very nice man run us up an estimate on getting the cabinet doors pre-made from the company (I would paint them myself)...and we also picked out a countertop and added that to the estimate.

Hopefully, the Benjamin Moore estimate will be coming to my inbox today or tomorrow and then we can decide where to go from there. We also got an estimate from Lowe's on the countertops, but not the doors, as their cabinet companies only sell the whole cabinet set-up, boxes plus doors.

I did find a shade of white paint I liked at Benjamin Moore for the cabinets, called "Mascarpone," which is the soft Italian cheese that everyone* on the Food Network always mispronounces as "MARS-capone," which is one of those little things that drives me up the wall.

*Except Giada de Laurentiis, who over-pronounces it: "maaaahs-caaaaar-POOOOOH-nehhhh," which is almost as bad.

The countertop is a laminate called Ebony Star, which is black with lots of white speckles. I know everybody and their aunt insists on granite countertops these days, but in this house, it would be like sewing diamond buttons on a flannel shirt. Plus I don't really like granite, nor is it in the budget.

Then there's the issue of a new backsplash and possibly a new kitchen sink, since ripping out the countertop will probably muck up the tiles that are on the backsplash now, and why put a 20-year-old sink back into a shiny new countertop?

So you can see how these little ideas always, always snowball! The painting will hopefully be commencing in a few days. By which time I will probably have lost my desire/energy/focus to do it! That shiny new countertop will be the carrot to my painting-loathing donkey self, though.