My Refurbished China Hutch

My husband and I decided that this was the year that we were are going to redecorate our home. For us, that meant that we wanted a lot of new pieces of furniture. I started doing my research on how much a new china hutch costs and oh my! We were definitely not willing to pay that much!!!

I have a friend who makes her own furniture and refurbishes old pieces. Her and her husbands work is incredible and she inspired/convinced me that I could do it too. 

FYI: I think I picked one of the hardest pieces to start with! It took almost two months from start to finish. I only worked on it while my daughter was at preschool. Which only gave me about 10 hours a week. Then from those 10 hours I could only work on it when we had nice weather. Rain and wind are not your friend when you are painting and it seemed like it was always windy on those days too. Very frustrating! 

But at last I am done! I am so proud of myself for not only completing this project and doing a great job on it too! Yea me! :)

Here is how it all came together:

First, I spent a lot of time on Craigslist. I knew exactly how I wanted the china hutch set up and it took awhile to find one at the price I wanted to pay. We negotiated down to $250.

the picture is from the Craigslist ad so it isn't very good

Here are the before pictures (that we took after we started taking it apart)

I love all the simple details!

The first step was to sand, sand, sand! Actually with the primer we used we didn't need to sand that much but we still did for the for the first layer.

I am not a very tidy painter

I put 2 coats of primer on the inside and 3 for the outside pieces. It is very important to sand between each coat!

after 1 coat

2nd coat on the inside 3rd coat on the outside

Finally it was time to paint! We choose the color Peacock Blue in a spray can. I ended up using 18 cans of  paint which was not cheap but well worth it because I didn't have any brush marks. I used a satin white for the handles. We sealed it with a spray satin poly (water based) finish. We used satin so it didn't have a high shine to it and water based because it won't yellow over time. (I am not showing any paint pictures until the bottom)

The hardware was so gross. Years and years of nasty caked on. It took a lot of elbow grease to clean them up.

look at all that stuff coming off, yuck

before and after

Now for the finished (and awesome) china hutch!