Dorm Hutches: Paint Over Stain

Caroline Sturman
Sep 20, 2015
2 min read

So my husband’s lovely cousin, Meagan, started attending Lynchburg College this fall. The campus is only 10-15 minutes from our house so naturally we helped her move in! As she was moving in, I noticed her mother had bought her two of the typical college dorm hutches that can go on top of desks or dressers to provide extra storage. These were just bare wood so I offered for Meagan to come over and we could paint them. We decided to stain them and add paint on top in a wash way. Did it work out exactly as we had intended? Absolutely not!

1. Stain. After wiping down the piece to get off all the excess dirt and dust, Meagan and I stained the two hutches with Dark Walnut stain. In hindsight, I probably would’ve put a pre-stain solution on first to prevent blotchiness. Also, to get the true paint color we wanted, we should’ve let the stain sit and dry over night before painting….oh well!

2. Paint. We were hoping to finish all of this in a day, so as soon as the stain seemed somewhat dry (not even an hour after applying the stain), we went ahead and started with the paint. Since we wanted a “wash” look, I added some water to the AS Louis Blue paint. We applied some paint, waited for approximately 10 seconds or so and then wiped it off.

As you can tell by the picture, what we ended up with was a dark blue-purple mix and we both thought it was pretty cool and left it.

3. Painted Flower. So I recently purchased Annie Sloan’s Quick and Easy Paint Transformations and in there was a cool idea for painting on flowers…you just need a match and a piece of paperboard. Cut the paperboard long enough for the stem of the flower and then smaller ones for the pedals. Once your paperboard is cut, lightly dip the whole edge into your paint (or lightly paint along the edge with your paintbrush) and then press it against the furniture. The match is used to make cute little dots around the flowers…just lightly dip the match in the paint and dot away! I tried this all on my sample board first because I was highly unsure of this method, but I thought it turned out pretty good. For this detail, I used AS Old White.

4. Wax. I waited 24 hours before applying AS clear wax. Especially for those darker pieces, it’s a good idea to put some wax on a plastic plate and then apply to the piece. This way, no dark paint gets into your can of wax. Don’t forget to wipe any excess wax off with a rag!