Choosing paint colour for cupboard

I thought I had the paint for the ELF cupboard - it is called milky white and is a satin gloss.  Even at satin it is too shiny for Georgian paint - they did have oils in their wood paint but never achieved a high gloss like our 'plastic' (polymer?) paints do today.  I rubbed it down, grunged it with grey and green acrylic but it still came up like my skirting boards at home.

Left side some goes at making the satin 'dirty' and flatter.  Right side same again on the left and then the chosen finish on the right of that piece.

Elizabeth also includes plenty of offcuts so you can mess about with finishes.  

trial and error

I was doing the classic mistake of trying to make a Georgian cupboard look like it would today - three hundred years old!  Why would it? - my ladies have just done a kitchen refurb - putting in a state of the art cooking range - they may well have just done a new paint job downstairs and even if they haven't the cupboard would have been painted just a few years ago and taken care of.

I have settled happily for the Eau-de-nil chalk paint on the right with a mid tan boot polish wax on top.  I have also knocked off the sharp edges of the wood to see if that works for drawers as they do seem to go like that after a bit of banging in and out.  That is just a matter of gently rubbing off the edges with very fine sandpaper.

To explain what you are looking at here and to praise Elizabeth's work again: this is the base unit with strips of wood added to make the dividers between the drawers.  You can have opening drawers, but I decided on top opening cupboards and non-opening drawers.

At this point in the make she rightly suggests you paint the base and the drawer fronts before gluing the drawer fronts in place.  This gives that nice bit of separation between the 'case' and the drawers (not filled with paint) so it looks more realistic.