Before & After Bliss: Part 2

Ok, I’ve tortured you enough!  Here’s the other, more dramatic and back-pain inducing makeover tale!

Once upon a time, there was a knotty pine hutch:

The hutch was lovingly built by the Prince’s father in a faraway land known as Ohio.  It was handed down from Mother to son on the occasion of his marriage to a fairy tale Princess.  On that occasion, it was given a minor facelift into the piece above.  But this hutch didn’t quite fit into the fairy tale kingdom and so it was decreed that the hutch would be rebuilt.  Thus begins a daring tale of design, paint, and a lot of know-how to bring this hutch from Colonial revival, to modern updated chic.

(Back to the modern day)

The first painful step was to remove the drawer fronts and the doors as they were all going to be changed.  The curvy Colonial style of the doors just didn’t really jive with our style and so we decided to again take some influence from our favorite store, “Ballard-Barn”, and try to mimic their beautiful pieces, a la:

and….

Images courtesy of Potterybarn.com

We took note of the overall “square-ness” of design and lack of curvaceous details.  While they are both definitely more contemporary, the pieces are not austere or untraditional, which we loved.  Once the doors were removed, we removed the “baseboard” of the piece that was very much in the Colonial style:

…and we replaced it with some more square pieces of pine, which we sanded down to give it a more “weathered” look.

Then while I, the fairytale princess, was sanding away at the piece and priming, the prince was off building new drawer and door fronts.  But before we finished it, we had to take the occasion to ham it up for the camera:

Where to?

In the end, the Prince finished off the doors in a fashion that was largely incomprehensible to the Princess – let’s just say it involved tools that I can’t recall the names of, but it ended with us inserting some faux panels on the backs of the doors and then sanding everything, priming, painting, polyurethaning, and then re-hanging the doors back where they belonged.

Nailing the backers onto the doors

After the doors were hung, drilling the holes for the hardware

So after a whirlwind weekend of surgery to a hutch, we managed to finally move it back into the house last night and finish off all of the last touches to this formerly oppressive piece of furniture into a lighter, brighter, and airier piece that serves as a much-needed storage unit in our home.  The big reveal:

…and all of that for the cost of lumber, a gallon of paint, and time lost on the weekend.  If you figure a similar piece from “Ballard-Barn” would run us anywhere from $1400-$3000 and we got ours largely for free + $100 for supplies, then that’s a bargain in my book!

J&L

Stay tuned for an update to this post in the coming weeks from Prince J on how he put the doors and drawers together!  You can also read more about this story as we gloat on The DIY Show Off as well as over at Young House Love when we were featured there as well!