What's gray and purple and green all over?

What's gray and purple and green all over?  

My bathroom sink-cabinet, that's what!  

I'm not anywhere near as awesome a furniture painter as FrugalWoods or the Frugal Girl, but that doesn't stop me from trying to slop color all over perfectly serviceable, but drab and dreary, pieces of furniture.  And since I'm not particularly prone to perfectionism, I try to go for a bit of extra color -- the "sin boldly" version of painting that tries to fool people into thinking "I meant to do that".

This particular cabinet, from the time we moved into this house last July, all the way up to yesterday, was  a kind of scuffed up light oak/pine color.  I love light wood, but not in this bathroom, which is otherwise full of white, chrome, silver, and green.  Also, not when it's all scuffed up.  I've been jonesing to bust out the paint for a while.  

The paint I had already stored up in the basement was, however, a little bit over the top for this project.  I had yellow, green, orange, and purple, all in pretty vibrant hues.   In particular, the green that I had on hand was the stuff leftover from this green-and-purple bookshelves project.  Kinda gaudy, which I like for my bookshelves, but a bit much for that little bathroom.

So I reverted to one of my favorite painting techniques, gleaned from Amy Dacyczyn's most excellent Tightwad Gazette: mixing paint.  In particular, she says that if you want to have a bunch of different colors that go together well, you can do it by mixing the colors together in various combinations.

I had a glass jar of yellow ("white raisin") paint from our living room at our former home, and clearly I no longer needed it for touching up that living room.  So I dumped a bunch of the bright green paint in there.  That became the basis for the toned-down green of this bathroom cabinet.  But in order to soften it further and pick up the gray of the countertop and such, I got a smaller jar in which I mixed together a bit of the green/yellow mixture  with a bit of purple paint.  (You can see that smaller jar on top of the counter).  The purple turned the mixture into a greenish sort of gray, which was perfect for this particular project.

So, after kinda-sanding down the cabinet (but not doing an excellent job of that, because I am not Frugal Girl/FrugalWoods), I painted the surfaces of the cabinet the green/purple mixture, and and the drawers and doors the green mixture. 

I really like the two-tone aspect of this cabinet, how green and gray mix well and how the knobs and radiator all kind of work together.  

I'm also surprised at how little paint a cabinet like this needs. I was worried about not mixing enough paint for the project, but I have a bunch of paint left over, and I don't know (yet) if there's anything else in the house that is going to benefit from having this kind of paint smeared all over it.    But, I have all summer to scout around for painting projects to take on . . . and since we no longer have a yard, I guess this'll have to be my version of a green thumb for now.