The China Hutch, Part I

Since I flaked out and didn't take a shot of the hutch before I started, here's the unit in the middle stages.

This piece was ugly. I mean, UGLY. When we originally got it, it was sitting outside my dad's shop, and had been rained on a couple of times. I halfheartedly sanded it down then, with the intent of refinishing it, but got sidetracked on something else. I had sanded and stained only the shelves when I decided it was just too much work. (Hey, that was BEFORE the electric sander!) That's the stain color there on the shelves, before I got started sanding them down.

So, the body of the unit was this kind of light wood, which turned out to be laminate. There was a warped and ugly piece of laminate on the back. The first thing I did was pull all of it off and junk it. Once the hutch was stripped down to its base elements, I sanded it down. There were several ugly stains on the tabletop portion of it that I was worried about, so what you see here in this picture is the hutch after its first coat of Kilz primer.

It took two coats of primer to prime most of the unit, and by four coats, the tabletop was still bleeding through on a couple of the stains. We decided to take our chances.
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To be continued.....