Old Hutch, New Paint and Repairs Needed, Badly!

Hutch Before

Cabinet After

An old hutch is not an uncommon item of furniture in many
households. These classic, traditional and much-used cabinets have been around for many years, serving as many uses through generations of families.

This old hutch was originally painted white, but as you can see in the “before” photo to the left, that fresh white paint had long since dulled to a dirty gray with various smudges and markings of orange, green and purple paint, likely left by little fingers. Needless to say, it needed a lot of love, starting with being completely taken apart, section by section since it was literally falling apart.

The doors didn’t have glass, but plexiglass that was barely held in place by the broken door pieces that were coming apart at the top. This alone made the cabinet difficult to transport from the customer’s home to ours. And as you can imagine it wasn’t light, so it had to be handled with care and carried carefully down the steps while watching those flimsy doors.

Once we got it into the workspace, Jim began the tedious process of removing the hardware, cabinets, plexiglass and doors. The sides were also falling off, so he took those off in addition to the doors and carefully marked each section for proper re-assembly. Each piece was then stripped, repaired, shored up and sanded prior to painting. The customer had wanted it to match her recently painted kitchen. Luckily, she still had some paint left over from the kitchen project and gave us the 1/3 gallon of pale gray paint which we used on the interior as well as the exterior of the hutch. The plexiglass was removed and replaced with actual glass. The drawer tracks were all but broken and needed to be rebuilt. The back of the hutch was mostly intact, but needed the horizontal wood slats replaced.

Our customer had asked for the shelves to moved up so she could store her coffee pots and other kitchen appliances, so Jim made each shelf adjustable, which required drilling holes on each side and adding metal pegs on which the shelves would rest. He also added to each shelf a 1-1/4” edge, which added strength as well as aesthetics. The glass door latching device was non-existent, so Jim added durable magnets at the top to keep the glass doors closed. New hinges and new knobs were added and the old hutch looked fantastic. It was not only much prettier, it was stronger and more functional than it had been in a long time.