A Fresh Coat of Paint

Along with probably two thirds of America, I am constantly feeling like my kitchen doesn't have enough storage. A couple of months ago, I started seriously looking for a sideboard buffet for our kitchen to help with our little storage situation. We had a completely empty wall, just waiting to be occupied. The only thing was...I knew what I wanted. And when you know what you want, sometimes it's hard to find exactly what you have pictured in your head.

We looked online, we looked in stores, we looked everywhere. Finally, I was bored one day and decided to check out Craigslist. Well, low and behold, I found the perfect piece of furniture! It wasn't exactly what I had pictured in my head, but I knew Jonathan and I could make a few changes and it would be absolutely perfect.

So off we went to a stranger's house to check out this sideboard. At first glance, I was in love :) Jonathan made the deal and shook on it (that never happens anymore), and we were back in the car trying to figure out how in the world we were going to get this thing home! It was a pretty hefty piece of furniture. After a couple weeks of deliberating, planning, and working some magic (well Uhaul actually came to the rescue), we had this gorgeous hunk of wood in our garage:



She's a beauty, huh? Okay, so she was definitely going to need some work. First of all, nothing in our kitchen is natural wood color except our kitchen table, which is a very light maple. So we new the color would have to change. We thought about staining it to match the table, or staining just the top and painting the rest white, or painting it entirely white. In the end we decided to paint it all white. That option just seemed to go best with our kitchen.

Not only would we need to put a coat of primer, 2 coats of white paint, and 2 coats of poly on the entire thing, but the drawers were also looking a little shabby. There are drawers at the top for silverware that looked like this inside:



And the insides of the other drawers definitely needed to be lined so I wouldn't have to worry about scratching up the wood with whatever I decided to put in it.

We also had to replace those awful cabinet pulls...seriously, they were awful. That was a job in itself! We wanted to find pulls we liked that matched with the holes already in the drawers so we wouldn't have to fill those and redrill new ones. After many trips to Home Depot, Lowe's, Wal Mart, and every store in between, a few purchases and a couple returns, we ended up with the perfect cabinet pulls too. In my head I had pictured brushed nickel pulls, but I actually love the black.

In the end, it was alot...I mean ALOT of work, but the result was better than I ever could have pictured:










Those pictures were taken the first night we moved the sideboard into the house from the garage. Since then I've accessorized the top a little, and currently it looks like this:



I still want to add a floating shelf above it to display a few more things, but all in all I'm happy with the outcome. I don't think we're planning to redo anymore furniture in the near future (it's really more work than it looks), but I do have a couple more posts planned, so stay tuned!