China Hutch

Happy Tuesday!

A little more about myself today--  while I am a stay-at-home mom, I also am a work from home mom.  I teach private piano lessons here in my home.  I have had 25 students at my highest point, but at the moment am down to 16, including my own lovely daughter.  I do those on Monday and Tuesday afternoons and evenings.  In fact, I have several openings if anyone is looking for a good piano teacher... ;)

On to the project of the day!  Even though I have painted furniture off and on through the years, this was the first project where I started to play around with distressing and antiquing.

I had a can of clearance paint from Lowes that was an off-white shade.  It was a little too yellow-ish for my taste, so I mixed in a bit of brown to try to tone it down.  Since I have no ASCP dealers near by, and I was unwilling to pay shipping in addition to the rather salty price of the paint, I decided to try a little DIY chalk paint.  My first try was with calcium carbonate and I totally guessed at the amounts.  I have since switched over to using plaster of paris and it actually creates a much smoother paint.  Keeping in mind that this was all experiment...and even though I had spent quite a bit of time haunting various blogs about using chalk paint and distressing and antiquing...I still had to make a few mistakes in the process.  Yes, I tried putting antiquing glaze right on top of the chalk paint.  MISTAKE!  It does soak right into the surface.  I finally ended up mixing a little bit of dark walnut stain into a clear glaze and this gave just the right amount of color to darken up the surface and settle into the crevices of the piece.

Here is a closer shot of the inside.  You can see I decided on a pop of blue for the inside.  I don't imagine you can tell from the pics, but my china has blue around the edges, so the cabinet color really brings that out. Yes, I was too lazy to take everything out of the hutch for a photo shoot!

I changed out the knobs and pulls that I found at Hobby Lobby.  YAY for 1/2 off!  Spray painted the hinges an oil-rubbed bronze to match.

Finished it all with a coat of clear Minwax Furniture Wax.  And I LOVE the way it turned out.  Especially for my first try.  In fact, it is probably still my favorite of the many very few (!!) projects I have completed.  I am actually considering trying to sell this one in favor of one that does not have to sit in a corner.  What do you think?  Would you buy this?

Blessings,

Ronda

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