Old, New, Borrowed, Black?

You may remember this photo from an earlier post. Steve and I worked on refinishing this piece of furniture Easter weekend.

I wanted a large buffet for our dining room. Ideally something that could hold my house plants, provide storage for kitchen items, and be a substantial piece of furniture that I could use as a serving space during parties or holidays. There is a buffet that matches our dining room table, but it comes with a hefty price tag.

Then, a free alternative popped up: my grandparents' hutch. My mom has had it in her kitchen for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, the hutch is one massive piece of furniture. It's over 5 feet tall and would overpower the dining room entirely. Then my mom informed me that the top detaches from the base. Hmm... this could work.

The base of the hutch has two deep grooves that lock the top into place. We decided to glue a piece of wood into the groove, fill it with wood putty, and sand the top smooth. This was moderately successful. We managed to make a flat surface, but it wasn't without flaws. This could be due to my lack of patience (and Steve's), the high humidity the weekend that we tackled this project, or simply that we were trying to fill a one inch gap with random stuff. Ideally, we'll resand, fill, sand, and paint the top again.

Here's the cabinet with primer on the top. You can't tell from a far distance, but if you look closely in person you can see the grooves.

A second concern was the hinges. We puchased them new, but they didn't quite fit and created a gap between the door and the face of the face of the cabinet. We needed to hurry and get the cabinet doors on before we had guests over, so Tim decided to spraypaint them for a quick fix. As it turns out, you an spraypaint just about anything!

I had this silver metallic spraypaint on hand because I used it to spraypaint our chainlink fence. And yes, that project turned out well. It was a quick fix to spruce up our fence with around $10 in spraypaint. I haven't taken any photos of it, but I should post to the blog.

Here's the finished product. Overall, it looks great despite the snags that we had! I planned to sew a runner for the top with leftover fabric from the bench, but I didn't have enough. Then, I found this cute padded runner at A Sweet Life, a local craft shop in Cincinnati. I thought this ended up being a better choice anyway because the fabric is darker. I plan to put my plants on this buffet, so the darker fabric would hide any leakage from the pots. So there you have it- something old turned new, borrowed from my grandma and mom, painted black!