20+ Beautiful & Inspiring Ideas For Painting An Old Hutch

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by Robin

Over the past few months, I’ve spent a ton of time searching for ideas for painting an old hutch. I knew that doing an old hutch makeover would be a creative and affordable way to solve one of the major problems we have on our main floor.

When we added a second storey to our little house in 2007 we reworked the main floor to be more open concept. Almost every room is quite open to the rest. For family connection and entertaining we love this! And every room has windows on at least two sides – often three – so the main floor is a bright and happy place to be.

There is a drawback to open concepts though: Storage. There’s never enough.

This is especially true when your square footage is small like ours. In favour of a connected space, we lost closets and walls to store things on. (Plus, our kitchen is small – as you can see here when we gave it a budget update and showed how to add modern open shelves. When you cook as much as we do you have a lot to store.)

Of course, we could just buy some beautiful brand-new storage solutions like free-standing hutches or cabinets. That would be easy.

But it also would be expensive and not “us”. We love upcycling and putting our own creative spin on things we can find used!

Rather than buying new, an old hutch makeover has so many benefits:

Cheaper (So many people are getting rid of china cabinets and buffets that they’ve inherited or are tired of. They just want them gone and will sell them for so little. Heck, we got a gorgeous one for free! You’ll see that one soon.)
More unique (You can completely customize your piece!)
Eco-friendly (Upcycling has a much lower carbon footprint than new and you’re potentially keeping things out of the landfill.)

So, how do you modernize an old hutch?

That’s exactly why I pulled together these hutch makeover ideas. A great starting point for new projects is seeing what other creative folks have done and then building your own ideas from those.

When researching ideas for redoing an old hutch I noticed three common strategies:

Change the Hardware.
- Often what really dates a china cabinet or hutch is the hardware. What I see most is old cabinets with really fancy, over the top hardware.
- Even without making any other change, fresh new hardware can do a lot to modernize your old piece.
- What can be tricky is finding hardware that will fit exactly in the original holes of your old hutch – but it is possible. Be sure to measure before you order!
- And if your plan is to paint your piece you can easily fill the old holes and put any style you like in their place.
Modify the hutch.
- If there’s a fussy top piece, or some trim that ages a piece you can always remove them.
- Or if your piece is too plain you can add some crown moulding or feet to make it more interesting. (We’ve never posted a tutorial for it, but that’s what we did with a very plain cabinet in our bathroom – you can see (really really bad) photos of it in our post about what matters when organizing and how to get started.)
Paint.
- Paint makes an ENORMOUS difference. It is such an affordable way to customize and make your old piece feel new.

How do you know what paint to use on an old hutch?

Painting a hutch with chalk paint is the most common solution that I’ve found.

But my plan is to use Fusion mineral paint. It’s so durable, requires very little prep work and has a gorgeous matte finish. I admit: I’m a Fusion addict. You’ve already seen us use it on these projects: