How to Add Farmhouse Details to Furniture

When I bought this hutch about 20 years ago I just loved it. It had natural farmhouse style and I love the look of old windows. Read on to see the evolution of this hutch with so much potential.
Bottom half of white hutch
Flash forward a few years and I decided the hutch needed to be green, which was a problem. The hutch had a waxy finish on it which I didn't realize and it took about 3 tries to paint because the paint kept peeling off.
The solution to this was to repaint the hutch one last time with a chalk paint because chalk paint can be painted on a waxy surface. As you can see it eventually went back to white. This photo was from several years ago before I started to declutter.
Large hutch with the doors open and packed with dishes
I left the inside of the cabinet green so my white ironstone dishes would show better, there apparently was no wax on the inside because there were no issues with peeling paint. 
Cabinet open with a green interior
As the years went on I added crates to the spaces where baskets once were. They gave the hutch the rustic farmhouse look that I was looking for.  
Kitchen view with large white hutch


Today I'm making one more improvement to the hutch. My daughter passed along 4 of the most beautiful handles she couldn't use and I knew I would find a place for them. 
Wooden handles with pewter accents

I am going to show you how you can easily replace knobs with handles on your furniture. 

White farmhouse hutch with glass doors.

The first thing I did was to make a template. I put sharpie marker on the tips of the screws that were attached to the handles and made a print of it on paper. I then made holes in the paper where the printed dots were. This was going to be the template for drilling new holes. You can read more about this process or how to add bin labels to furniture in these stories by following the bold links. 
Wooden and pewter handle

I used a pencil to mark the new holes on the hutch using the template. I lined up the bottom hole with the one that was already there from the original knob then marked the top hole and drilled. I had to place the handles a little higher than I normally would on this hutch because of the old key holes in the doors.
Creating a template to change a knob to a handle on furniture

The new knobs were a perfect match to the crates in the bottom of the hutch.
hutch with Pinterest overlay



Wooden handle on white hutch
The old knobs were the only thing I didn't like about the hutch and now it looks pretty amazing! ... and much more decluttered!
View of hutch with new handles

Thanks so much for visiting. 

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Homeroad

I am Susan, the author and creator at Homeroad. I am a wife, mother of 4 daughters, and a grandmother of 5 and counting. I am a retired teacher, a DIY blogger and an artist at heart. .