Hello, Darlington: Meet [Jimmy] Buffet

As we were updating our college/old apartment furniture we upgraded our low black particle board walmart tv stand to my mom's old sofa table. It worked for the most part since it was a much better height and had a drawer but since the entire back was open you could see all our cord junk and I hate that. So I've been eyeing the using-a-buffet-for-a-tv-stand trend for a while and I am sold. Thus began my hunt and boy these things aren't quite as easy to come by as I thought they would be. When it comes down to it you can't just go get any buffet. Some are too tall, some have small drawer space, some are too damaged and some were perfect because someone else had already redone them - but those were super expensive (like, over 400 dollars).

So one day nana and I decided to stop in this antique mall right down the road and took a look around. The owners were great and helped us look around, but they're wasn't anything that caught my eye. So there we were walking back to the car and the owner ran out and called us back in. He had this hutch/buffet combo that was detachable that he was willing to sell just the bottom piece he wanted us to take a look at. The drawers were the perfect size, the height and width were good and it was solid (read - hella heavy) wood. The 100 buck price tag was the icing on the top. Here it is back home as dark and shiny and gloomy. My plans were to strip as much as I could and paint what I couldn't. We planned to take out the top two drawers and build a shelf to rest in it so we could slide in our consoles. In all there are the top two longer drawers, the bottom four drawers and a center door cubby area.

Here is the top once I striped about 5-8 layers off of it. We thought to either re-stain it or paint it but we loved the look of the roughed up, uneven look of the wood once striped.

I initially started stripping the sides and drawer area but it got to be too tedious so I said to heck with it and primed it. Luckily we loved the look of a painted bottom with a wooden top.

Here are my tools that I used to for non-prime painting process. One quart of Valspar paint+primer, low odor, no VOC paint in a nice grey, a small foam roller and small foam brush. I went with foam because I hate brush strokes and foam is my new painting jam.

Here is [Jimmy] Buffet all finished! Yay! I did put a satin poly on the wooden top and ended doing two full coats of the paint. Oh, and we got knobs from Hobby Lobby when they were half off. Oh, and a metal basket we had sitting around the house fits perfectly in the old door cubby area and holds our couch blankets.