My "new" old hutch

Please try to ignore the fact that my picture is extremely crooked.  I couldn't get the best angle on it since my dinning room table (which got a pretty nice makeover too) was wet and in the way.  Here it is, a whole month worth of work, finally finished!!  And I have to say that I am pretty happy with the outcome and I might just keep it after all.  That is if my sister-in-law forgets that I have it. Hehehe! (She wants it really bad now that it looks so pretty!) 

I completely forgot to take ANY pictures of this while I went along, and didn't even take one of it before I started. Luckily I had a screen shot of it from a Facebook site when I tried to sell it.  Here are those pictures:

That's a pretty cute kid right there, if I do say so myself! hehe.

We purchase this hutch, along with a dinning table, when my fiance and I moved into our first rental together.  We bought it from the land lord mainly because she was leaving the set behind and we needed the table.

I didn't care much at first because we had plenty of room for it at the time.  Once we bought our current home and started having children space became limited and I was tired of having this 7 foot long gigantic, dark piece of furniture taking up much needed space.  ( My dinning room is not all that big, but one day I hope to change that. :-) )   After trying to sell it for a very long time, I decided  that I would turn it into something that I would not mind looking at and using every day.

Here is how I did it:

              First thing I did was remove the doors, and the drop down door right there in the middle.  I did this because I felt like whenever I put something in there I just forgot about it or didn't use it because it became "hidden."  As the old saying goes "out of sight, out of mind." 

              Next I removed all the wooden "flowers" that were on the bottom cabinet doors.  I did this only because I never liked them.  

               The next thing that had to go was the old, broken, record player and what I thought were speakers and only ended up being the front of the speaker box.  Doing this gave me soooo much more storage space!  That in itself made me a happy girl! 

                 Next was taking the mirror out.  It was old and had odd brow spots that wouldn't some off no matter what I used to clean it.  I have to say I like it better without it anyway. 

                After removing all of that stuff it came time to rough sand the whole. entire. thing.  Wow, how tiring that job was!  If only I had known then what I know now; that you can use oil based primer on finished wood to avoid sanding!  Oy! 

                 I did a lot of cleaning after that, and then some more cleaning, and some more, to get all the dust off it from sanding.  Not fun at all!

             My favorite part was painting it.  As you could tell from this picture my son had fun painting it to when I left the room to let the dog out:

I sure learned my lesson after that! 

 I used Behr premium paint and primer in Navajo White.  I absolutely LOVE this color and picked it at the VERY last possible minute.  The best snap color decision I ever made.  I took me about 2 coats, and I think I could do another.  The back board is a custom color that I had matched at Home Depot.  It was supposed to match my couch pillow, but it ended up much darker and kind of green.  Overall I really like it a lot.  

           Oooooo, how could I forget to mention the new hardware!? I was super duper excited to add drawer pulls to the plain old drawers!  I picked up the knobs and drawer pulls at my local Walmart. I had my eye on some at Home Depot, but then I seen these at Walmart and they looked almost exactly like the ones from Home Depot, but half the price!  There was no way I wasn't going to grab them up.  I do think that perhaps the knobs should be a bit bigger though.... 

 And that's that.  My "New" old hutch.  After I decide if I want to add another coat of paint to it, I have to give it a final coat of a water based finish, like Minwax Polycrylic, to protect all of my hard work.  

I have another piece of furniture that I have lined up to refinish and I hope it comes out as good as this did.  

Soooo, what do you all think??  Do you have an awesome before and after of a piece of furniture you just couldn't stand to look at anymore?  If so, I would love to see it!