Hutch Re-Do

This is what my china hutch looks like now:

I love it so much! This is what it looked like this morning:

Well, not blurry, but you get the idea. It was dark and uninspired and was not bringing me any joy. This is a problem, so I decided to do something about it. First thing I did was to take everything out and dust in there. Then I covered the back with this:

To brighten up the space. It's just scrapbook paper by My Mind's Eye in a pattern called Blue Diamonds and I tacked it up with a little bit of adhesive from my ATG gun. It took nine sheets to cover in there and I had some scraps leftover that I can use for cards!

Next I tackled the problem of those plate racks. I got them at Ikea and they're 1/4 inch too wide for the cabinet. You can't really tell in that photo, but the doors never closed all the way and it drove me nuts! I took the baby to visit his nana on Friday, and happened to notice that she had a coping saw in all her stuff. She said I could have it, so I used it to hack a half inch off one of my plate racks and now it fits in there perfectly.

When we got married, I had this idea that we had to register for some kind of dishes. I knew I didn't want traditional china (that's just not "me") so my husband suggested stoneware. I found these awesome kohl Calvin Klein stoneware dishes that we both loved so we registered for those. The plan was to just buy whatever we didn't get to round out our collection.

Um, yeah. Word to the wise - if you're having a SMALL wedding (like, inviting about 30 people), registering for dishes is a bad idea. We got four place settings. As I said, we had planned on just buying a few more place settings after the wedding, as well as the serving pieces, so this wasn't going to be a problem for us. What ended up being a problem was finding out that they freaking discontinued the line not even six months after the wedding when I went to order them!!! Of course, now I'm seeing that they brought them back. Grr. Too late now, Calvin! Too late now!

Needless to say, these plates, although loved, have been a thorn in my side since. I put them in the cabinet on display because they were my "nice" (as opposed to "Target") dishes. The problem, as you can see in the photo, is that because they are almost black they disappear in there. I decided that I needed to have something that I really loved in there to admire every day. Out came my collection of milk glass! Between that, and the patterned paper, it's so much lighter and brighter and overall happy now.

There was one big empty spot on the right hand side where I didn't have anything tall enough, so the display felt a little bit unbalanced. I remembered that I had picked up a wooden frame at the Goodwill on Friday for 99 cents, so I took that outside and gave it a few coats of white spray paint. While it was drying, I printed out this sign that I've had saved on my desktop for a while:

I have no clue where I found it, but it prints out really well! It needed to be tweaked a little in Photoshop to fit my vintage 8" x 6" frame, but when I was done it was the perfect thing to put behind those white dishes. The original plan had been for it to go on the gallery wall in my scrap room.

To finish off the transformation, I put all of the vases and containers that didn't match my milk glass theme into the cupboard below the hutch and rearranged the stuff on top. I also changed out the flowers on the curly willow sticks (flower tutorial tomorrow!) since I now had so much blue there. Finally, I pulled a green stoneware pie plate out of the cupboard to layer in between the cake stand and the bubble bowl to bring a bit more color into that area. I just won two more of those bowls on eBay and they should be coming in the mail this week. There's also one on my mantel. I saw a picture online somewhere once where someone had a stack of a dozen of them and I thought it looked so cool, so I'm building a collection.

While I was changing things out, I went ahead and made a new mini table runner. I used the striped fabric from the baby buckle toy on one side and then some of the leftover green buffalo check from my Christmas stockings on the reverse. If I get bored I can just flip it over!

The mini milk glass compotes were purchased on Etsy. I actually have a third one of these that I found at a thrift shop. You can see it on the left side of the middle shelf in the hutch photo. I tucked in some faux hydrangeas in them and stuck my sugar bowl (another Goodwill find) in the middle. Pretty!