From Bookcase Display to China Hutch: Part 1

With the bedroom finally finished, I decided to start working on the dining room. Since you can quickly see the dining room as soon as you walk through the front door, it is a space that has needed to be addressed for a while now.

The room is going to take so much work. I need a dining room table since the table we were using is in my booth at The Pickers Market. I need chairs to go around the table. I may have enough between the stash in my garage, storage unit and parents house but I’ll have to wait and see. There is one large wall in the dining room and it needs a piece of furniture that is pretty substantial. I need a lot of storage for my ever-growing vintage china collection. But I also want to have a place to display found treasures.
Since we’ve moved out of our space in St. Augustine, thankfully, I had a few pieces of furniture leftover. One being part of a display. I knew it would be perfect for the hutch portion but it was in pretty bad shape. Sometimes, DIY goes awry and this is a prime example. Oh that paint job, no words.

With the dining room walls painted in a mix of white and off white, I decided I would paint the outside of the reclaimed hutch black and the inside off white. I chose off white because I thought it would show off the vintage china and treasures best. I used one coat of primer on the entire piece.

I used black on the outside and a custom mix of chalk paint and interior paint on the inside in shades of white and off white. I really like the way the wood grain showed through the back of the hutch and I continued to use a heavy grit sandpaper to achieve the look I wanted.
It took several coats of paint on both the outside and inside. I used furniture oil to give an extra aged look, allowed to dry over night and sealed with clear paste wax the following morning.

It has taken me a good portion of the day to complete but I’m starting to get excited about the look. I’ll tackle the bottom tomorrow. Many blessings, CoCo