This hutch redesign was fun and required some creative thinking. Thankfully, John and I like being creative. We drove almost an hour from home to buy this hutch from a nice family who had so kindly allowed Spiderman to live with them. I didn’t know Spiderman is 3, almost 4, and looks for lions in the jungle. :)

We liked the structure of the piece, but once we inspected it more closely, we noticed flaws we hadn’t seen when we picked it up. One was the fact that the right hand door didn’t meet the center wood piece. It would be a pain to fix and I thought that the doors made it too closed in looking. See the gap?

Also, I didn’t like where the handles were located on this piece. Not only on the top, but also on the drawers. I fixed the drawers by simply filling the holes with spackling compound, sanding them down and then priming over the whole piece.

To fix the top, I hammered off all of the front of the hutch. It actually came off pretty easily; no cutting required.

I primed the whole piece with the pale grey primer that I already had from the Red Hutch redesign. After that dried, the second step was to paint the entire hutch a warm white color. I had to let that dry and paint it a second time. I used a paint brush for all of these steps because I thought it gave the piece the antique, chic look I was going for. Next up, I put painters tape around each shelf so the teal I was painting on the back of each shelf wouldn’t get on the white.

I also added a stencil between both bottom drawers to give it a more sophisticated look.  This time I used a painting sponge instead of a paint brush and it worked much better.

See the cute knobs? I picked those up for $1.50 each on sale at the Hobby Lobby! Love the fleur-de-lis with the black showing through. That inspired me to distress the piece to bring out some of the original wood. So, I went at it with our electric sander. I tried using a sanding block, but it just wasn’t getting to the wood as quickly as I wanted. I know, so impatient! lol

Anyway, I found that if you use the side of the sander it gave me the look that I was going for. I went on all the edges of the shelves and drawers and then randomly on the sides and back of the hutch. Then we added white trim on either side of the front of the shelves to give it a more polished look. And what’s the last step? That’s right, Polyacrylic it with our sprayer. Are you ready for the finished beauty? Here she is!

Oh, and while I was taking the picture… my little beauty wanted her picture taken with it.

How can you say no to that? It was family movie time… hence the bowl of popcorn. :)
So, once again here is the before and after.

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Thanks,
Sarah