Hutch Makeover

I've been admiring the handiwork my friends Catherine and Cindy have been posting. They are both talented women taking furniture from discarded or tired to stunning pieces. Both have been using chalk paint; and while I love the look of chalk paint I hate waxing. So when I found this hutch for sale I decided to try my hand at refinishing it with cabinet paint.

Step One:

Give it a good cleaning and the degloss it to remove the laquer finish. 

Step Two:

Fill holes where old hardware was with wood filler. Let sit for 30 minutes. Sand lightly. Then apply primer. I brushed on Killz to be sure the red undertones of the wood did not come through. 

Step Three:

I decided to paint the inside a light grey and the outside white. This took about three coats with a cabinet roller. Once dry I used a razor blade to scrape the paint off the glass. Although it's a pain to scrape all of that paint off, I didn't have painters tape on hand and was too eager. I did find that using the roller I had more drips than I'd prefer. Grrr. Lastly, I attached the new hardware. I needed to drill new holes as the pulls were bigger than the original ones. 

Step Four:

Set in place and style. I divided my hutch into virtual sections.  Using only items I already had in the house, I placed similarly shaped and colored items in each section. Doing this allows the eye to travel around the whole display and lends to cohesiveness. 

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Project Breakdown-

Cost of Hutch: $125 via online yard sale

Cost of Supplies: $125 via Lowes

Time: 5 days

Difficulty: Easy

What I would do differently next time...

1) Tape the glass

2) Try a brush to paint top coat (maybe this will prevent drips better). I tried a roller because I didn't want to see brush stokes. 

3) If I could go back in time, I would not have dropped one of the quarts of paint, causing 1/2 the can to go all over the garage floor. LOL