The Green Hutch

I'm linking to Primitive and Proper :)

I finally finished the hutch!  If you remember back about a month I posted about finding a hutch on craigslist for $20.

It needed a lot of work, but that work is done, and now the hutch is happily located in the kitchen helping me to keep our house a bit more organized.

First step was to sand the entire hutch, which was a lot of work!  I ended up caving and buying an electric sander because my arms were so tired. After sanding the whole piece I worked with my future father-in-law to make sure that the piece was structurally sound.  It was made without adequate support in the back and over the years had begun warp and lean backwards.  Dana and I pulled off the bottom supports (which were falling apart and did not look cute) and attached a solid piece of wood along the bottom to help support the entire piece.

Then we lifted it off the ground by  adding feet made of two bundt feet from Lowe's stacked on top of eachother.  This is a picture of me drilling holes in the feet so that we could attach the two together (and then to the hutch) with a really long screw

Once the piece was structurally sound, I began the cosmetic improvements to the piece.  We chose Tumbleweed Green from Valspar in an oil-based paint to achieve nice even coverage.

And then it was just painting everything... which took a bit of time.  It ended up taking two coats to get good coverage, and it took a while to dry in between each coat, but the look is well worth it!

After painting the green, I decided to do a dark, rick brown for the inside and shelves of the hutch.  I went with a buckeye brown latex paint that came in the small sample size.  It took three coats to get nice even coverage, but the look is worth it!

And here is the final product all set up in our kitchen!  It is so nice to have the extra storage space and the splash of color in our townhouse :)