Amberley- We are going for an unfitted look in our kitchen and have had a pine work island table an 2 jam cupboards custom made and because of budget the rest of the cupboards will be Ikea Tidaholm. We're doing alot of customizing ourselves so although they might not be our first choice in doors they are a simple shaker that we think will blend in well with our other period pieces. I would really like to have the doors sprayed but cannot find a single place in Toronto who will spray them in F&B. Most places like to use their own brand. I know you can't color match BM to F&B and thats why I don't want to waste Old White on the cupboards. I thought it would be easier to pull off a cream/off white color in BM and use Old White on the walls. We're putting on a fairly large addition and doing all our own work so having someone else paint the cupboards is a gift we decided to give ourselves.I guess the other alternative is to break down and just do it.The problem with that is that they have to be sanded as well, my least favorite job, I think I recall that you were going to go with Ikea doors as well or order from Shers(spelling?) Did you paint your own and if so what kind of a finish did you get? Your kitchen is going to be gorgeous and your house looks beautiful as well. It's old is is not? Theres nothing like old American Architecture.

wryorwhite -- Don't be scared by all this talk of yellowing. It's exaggerated. Bear in mind that oil-based paint was essentially all that was used in American homes through the 1980s -- so unless you're a teenager, you were around when any house you'd walk into (including the one in which you grew up) had its walls painted with oil-based paint. Trust yourself and your own experience...do you ever remember walking into a house and thinking to yourself "My, these walls are awfully yellowed!"? I sure don't. When's the last time you've heard someone say "Oh, look at those walls! They've gone from looking like snow to looking like Big Bird! This is certainly oil-based paint!"? Never. Yes, oil-based paint yellows very slighly with time. So do all oil-based products, including the clear polyurethane with which wood floors are most often finished. This "yellowing" effect is minimal, and it's not something that jumps out at you or is offensive or anything like that. You have to actively look for it, and the only people who do that are (a) homosexuals, and (b) people who work in the marketing departments of latex-based paint companies. The drawbacks of latex-based paint have largely been resolved in the past few years. The latex-based paints of 2008 are a far cry from the ones of 20 years ago. This is especially true with the high-quality brands like Pratt & Lambert. Modern high-end latex pains bond to drywall well, hold up to moisture and cleaning well, etc. However - latex-based paints aren't as good as oil-based paints when it comes to moisture and dirt resistance, standing up to scrubbing, and bonding to wood. They never can be, because oil (unlike latex) naturally resists water, and naturally soaks into wood (rather than just sitting on top like a skin). Think of what happens when you mix oil and water -- they don't mix; instead, they just separate and keep apart. So moisture and dirt don't bond to the oil-based paint, so it's very easy to clean without damage. In addition, oil-based paint soaks into wood -- unlike latex-based paint, which forms into a skin that you can peel off. This is one of the big drawbacks of using latex paint on high-traffic wood items (like kitchen cabinets). My house has latex-based paint on the walls and ceilings, and oil-based paint on all the wood trim (including the doors and windows and cabinets) -- this is a time-tested and popular arrangement, and it has held up very well for me and my neighbors. Speaking of polyurethane -- there are two types, oil-based and water-based (latex-based) - same as paint. ALL of the manufacturers -- Minwax, Cabot, etc. -- recommend strongly in favor of using the oil-based polyurethane on floors. It's tougher, it holds up better to traffic and moisture, and this "yellowing" effect that the self-proclaimed experts yammer on about are so minimal as to be non-existent. The same is true with the oil-based vs. water-based (latex-based) paints. Again, trust yourself and your own experiences -- how many times have you walked into a home and thought to yourself that the painted walls and ceilings, or the wood floors, were yellowed?

Kasha - I love mixing my own colors, and do it in an "abbreviated" way often, which I'll explain in a minute. But it true that if you want a large quantity of your own mixed color, after experimenting to find the color inputs you'll need to be brave and mix all of what you need at once because truly it is virtually impossible to match your own color exactly later on. I learned about color theory and paint color mixing from a couple of classes that I took at UCLA extension design program, one in color theory and another in faux painting. The faux painting class was taught by an excellent professional who mixed virtually all his own color from scratch and taught us how he did it. He *weighed* the color pigments in order to match his creations later, and even this, with a special and expensive scale, was imperfect (although very good). I've never gotten the scale myself as I'm only a DYI faux painter. However I've been doing a lot of faux over the last year as we've been remodeling an adobe house in Santa Fe that has all hand troweled plaster walls inside, which we've commissioned as part of the remodel. Some are peach colored plaster (the "old" structolite) and some are off white (the "natural" structolite, that's all that is available now). The plaster walls have lots of natural varigations in color in them. But even so, the plasterers leave faults that show up as, for example, a whole "picture" in white of their trowel on a peach wall, or rust spots that seep thru the plaster from the netting underneath. And, we've had some changes made in the plaster, such as replacint a window with a french door, which leaves a line in the surrounding area. In Santa Fe, faux painters are routinely used to fix these faults in the plaster, by making them invisible via spot faux painting that imitates the varigated look of the unpainted walls. This is what I've learned to do, and thank heavens for the classes I took. We've saved lots of $$, and it's fun to boot! Here's what I do, and you might be able to do something similar. I take a piece of the plaster I want to match to my favorite local paint store, in my case Benjamin Moore paints. They match it, and I specify the gloss level to match the clear sealer gloss I've already put on the wall. I use this paint as the base for my faux work. I am able to do this because each time I make sure that I get the formula for the paint that they create, so that I understand the color components and their relative amounts. For example, the peach paint they made for me is made with a pastel base (white, I know now from Faron), and to this is added red oxide, yellow oxide and a tiny bit of black. I put some of this paint in my pallette tray along with separate amounts of the component colorants. I then mix on the spot various "versions" of the original paint to get the varigations in color that I'm looking for on a particular spot of wall. So if you have a color that is close to what you are looking for and can find out the color components, you can experiment with adding more of any of them to see if you can get closer to what you want. It's trial and error but in my experience after a while you come to know what, say in my case, more red oxide will do to the base color, or what effect a little more black will have. If you can focus on a particular color as a base, you can really come to understand how to create variations in it. As to obtaining the colorants themselves, I have a set of 14, 16 oz containers of universal colorant that I put together during the class several years ago. 16 oz containers are, I have come to realize, *huge* for this type of work and I will never use all of it in 5 lifetimes. The brand is Proline, and I bought it at a local paint store in L.A.. But you can probably order it or something similar online. Our instructor emphasized that it's important to have a pretty good variety of color to start, if you want to blend your own color from scratch, as what do you do when you don't have something that you need right then. (I did do some of this before I started working from a base of pre-made paint.) Anyway, here are the colors I have, that he said were the basics. The numbers are the Proline color numbers: PL33A: LF Yellow Med. PL-36: Permanent Violet PL-3: Raw Umber PL-4: Burnt Umber PL-15: Chrome Oxide (a green) PL-11: Thalo Blue PL--9: Permanent Green Med. PL-18: Raw Sienna PL-14: Bulletin Red PL-12: Thalo Green PL-50: White PL-6: Red Oxide PL-16: Lampblack PL-2: Yellow Oxide. I also got a tube of oil paint in Burnt Sienna. Good luck! Using colorants is really fun! Katie

Crayons are fine for colorant. I advise against the glitter, because I do not know if is is safe, when exposed to heat & flame. As for "food essence", I have no idea what that is. There are fragrance oils, made specifically for candles. They should be safe & work the best.