Mint to be.

When we moved into this house, we wanted to rip out the faux wood paneling, wood kitchen cabinets, brown vinyl flooring, etc. and return the house to its proper place in history - the 1940s/50s. In the suburban age, when so many houses are built at the same time as the neighbors' houses, it's pretty standard for communities to keep their houses looking all alike. Example: "Granite" and "stainless" have pretty much become one word in the last ten years. Blerg. This phenomenon has spread to cities, too. It's not uncommon for someone to buy a 1940s post-war bungalow or a 1960s ranch house in Chicago and immediately rip every ounce of charm out to make it look like a 2000s house in Naperville. The house gods frown upon this behavior and will eventually punish it by making today's trends completely repulsive tomorrow and causing homes with trendy "updates" to plummet in value. (For more on this mess, please read Retro Renovation's recent post "We Do Not Live In Greek Temples.")

Of course, all of our retro-vation takes time and money, but it will get done. In the meantime, my sister Bob Vila Mary came up from FL to paint my brown cabinets white, which helped brighten the kitchen and make it liveable for the moment. We also had a guy paint the wood paneling yellow.
Naturally, the kids started picking at the paint on both surfaces immediately. What is it with kids picking at things?

I looked long and hard for cabinets that I wanted and finally decided that only Ikea sold anything remotely close to "retro." (They have a top-notch set with very clean, simple lines that comes in a glossy red that is to die for.)
I wanted steel cabinets (Yes, Virginia, cabinets were in the 1950s modern home were steel. Trusty old U.S. Steel steel.) but every time I'd find some they were either hella expensive or rusted through because some bozo had been using them to store unbottled saline solution on the back porch of his beach house.

So I was planning my eventual (far off - the Ikea line I settled on is not cheap) purchase and moving forward with the rest. We had a guy come install drywall in the kitchen, had the Junk Removal truck come take away that wood paneling and haul it to where it should have gone as soon as it came off the assembly line, and we had the chairs from the chrome/vinyl dining set left by the previous owners recovered from brown to bright aqua. I wanted mint somewhere in my kitchen and red, too. Mint and red are a classic retro combination, as are aqua and red, but I wanted to know if I could get away with mint, aqua AND red. While googling I ended up at Retro Renovation, which is the best site ever. I hadn't been there in probably six months because all the renovations just make me jealous, but I was looking at some aqua/red stuff there and clicked on their "Steel Cabinets for Sale" forums just for kicks.

Lo and behold, someone had just posted a link entitled "$200 Kitchen - Chicago Craigslist!" and something about how they wished they were closer to Chicago.
I clicked on the link, fully expecting the usual rusty stuff.
This is what I saw:

Alright, so they look mint green and they look gorgeous, but surely when you open them, they're rusted through the back, right? Or, they've already sold. Or they're on the West Side and you can't pick them up without a police escort. At the very least, he has a crap camera and they're really white. They cannot be this perfect.
Whatever. I called.

The guy who answered is in the process of wrecktovating his late aunt's house to sell it (see that bit about losing a home's charm with current trends) and he said they were still available. They were less than a mile from my house.

He said I could come see them the next day. I couldn't help but get kind of excited. "Are they --- mint green?" I asked. "Yeah, they are," he answered, like it was a bad thing.

I went over the following morning. You know that look grooms get on their face when they turn to face their  processing bride for the first time?

I am normally a shrewd shopper and I will contain myself to get a decent price on a Craigslist item, but only if it's overpriced in the first place. These cabinets were severely under-priced. And they were perfect.
I must have said, "They're perfect!" a hundred times. "I love them! I love your aunt! I love this house! I love her colors!"
So I definitely wanted them.
While we were there, Mary started playing (with their permission and encouragement) on a piano. The guy said, "If you can move it, you can have it for free." I got pretty excited about that but then couldn't find anyone to move it for less than $225 so we couldn't get that, but no matter.

The next day, we went over and the two guys who were selling them and Joe disassembled and moved the cabinets to our house. They came with a rad, perfect gray formica countertop and a double porcelain sink.

We kicked around the idea of having them repainted (people tend to have this done by auto body shops) but really, they don't need to be repainted. They're in great shape save a tiny bit of outer surface rust in a couple of spots and they really just need cleaning for now. They're 60 years old and the only two with any surface rust were right above a badass retro dishwasher that some lucky chap in Virginia bought. So, old dishwasher = steam = rust if you aren't careful. I've never needed a dishwasher and when I did have one, I never used it, so this won't be an issue for me.
 
I'm going to have the most awesome kitchen on the block when this is over.
You mark my words.