Have a Seat
If you've been to our house recently, you've already seen the end result of this project, but I figured it was about time I shared the journey of how we got here. After all, I only started this project back in July!
As I said before, we needed a lot of new furniture to fill up our house, including a dining room table and chairs. I spent a day shopping with Nicole and found a table I liked (as did Tom when I brought him back later to look at it) but no one really liked the chairs that went with it. So we bought the tables and started the search for chairs. At some point I got the idea that I wanted the chairs to be blue. Of course I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere, so shortly after, I decided that I'd paint the chairs myself.
I found some unfinished chairs I liked on Wayfair, and ordered 8 of them. A few days later I came home to 8 of these huge boxes lined up in front of our garage. Looking at them all next to each other made me realize that maaayybe I was in a bit over my head...
At this point I'd already committed, though, so off we went to Lowes to buy some spray paint. I figured with all the rounded edges and rods that painting them with a brush would be miserable. I knew people who had spray painted furniture before and it seemed pretty easy. So one afternoon I set up the chairs on some cardboard on our very dead lawn, and after sanding them lightly, I decided to start spraying.
It actually was pretty easy, and almost immediately there was a pretty satisfying change. It made me feel better about my idea to do this by hand. However, I soon realized that while it was a pretty quick task to get some color on the chair, it took FOREVER to get the chair to a point where there were no more white/unfinished spots. Let alone get 3-4 coats of color on. On the first day, I ran out of spray paint before I finished a single chair. Instead I had 3 partially covered chairs, and 5 more to go.
These chairs quickly became a recurring weekend project for me. Buy more spray paint, pull out the chairs, don my protective outfit of gloves, mask and sunglasses, spray the chairs until I ran out of spray and/or was sure they were completely covered, repeat in a few days once I realized that I was still. not. done.
I even took a day off of work at one point to "finish" the chairs. Of course I ran out of spray paint, but I also realized that even though the paint I was using was a gloss, it wasn't enough and I would need to respray all the chairs with a clear gloss before they were usable.
It took forever, but in the end I'm really happy with how they turned out. I'm not sure I'd do it again, but I'm super proud of them right now. Every time someone comes over, I pretty much make them admire the chairs before doing anything else haha.
And while there are only 6 chairs around the table, I did finish all 8 of them. We have another leaf that we can put in our table, so if we ever decide to have a bunch of people over, we have extra chairs available!