Let me start out by encouraging you not to do this project 😉
Just kidding… kind of…
If you read the post about my dining room, you saw that my inspiration had gorgeous kelly green Chippendale chairs. I love them, like super duper love them, but they weren’t in the budget for this room makeover.
As I said in my Dining Room Makeover post, I wanted the room to be a mix of modern and traditional and my existing chairs just didn’t cut it. As any good bargain hunter would do, I turned to marketplace and Nextdoor to find a good alternative. I ended up with a nice table and 6 chairs for $75. The bad part was that my hubby had to drive 45 minutes to get them, sorry babe.
My plan was to paint the chairs kelly green and keep the table as is. The chairs were in good shape with the exception of a couple that needed some wood glue and filler in a couple of places. I did what I always do before starting a project and did a quick Pinterest search on how to paint chairs and I found a couple of posts about how these AMAZING women painted 10 million chairs in an afternoon. I convinced myself that I could do the same and got to work. The next day, I used some wood glue and filler on the broken chairs and let them set up over night.
On Monday I went to the hardware store and bought some liquid deglosser, spray primer and spray paint. Surely, I would be finished by the end of the day… right… All started out well enough, I used the liquid sandpaper on the chairs and set up an area in the backyard to start priming. Let me say, I love Zinnser primers. They aren’t paying me to say so, I’m pretty sure they don’t know I exist, but I have loads of experience with it and it always works really well.
The only thing different this time, was that I was using the spray primer, a first for me. The primer went on really well, but it took almost 2 cans for one chair, at almost $8 a can, that was going to add up, and I’m cheap. I decided to do one chair to see how I liked it with the paint to make sure I wanted to go all in for the other 5 chairs.
The weather was super windy thanks to the remnants of a tropical storm and I knew there was no way I could do the project in my backyard. I ran to the dollar store to get supplies to set up a makeshift spray booth in my garage.
After spraying the chair with primer, I sanded it to a super smooth finish with 220 grit sand paper and applied the first coat of spray paint. The color was amazing, but again, I realized each chair would require a couple of cans of the kelly green spray paint. I decided that was okay since I loved the color and high gloss finish.
Fast forward to the next day and I was ready to get back to it. I figured the best solution would be to pull out our old paint sprayer. It hasn’t seen the light of day in about 4 years and I was super scared it wouldn’t work anymore. I found it in the garage and set out to get it all cleaned up, that took forever. If you have one, you know they are amazing, but you should also clean it out really well after every use and of course, I didn’t do that. The cleaning process took the better part of the day and with all of the other things on my plate that day, I didn’t end up getting to spray a single chair. I was now on day 4, and thought for sure, today would be the day I finished the project.
The sprayer worked like a charm, and even though I used my respirator, the fumes were awful. To add insult to injury, the chairs were taking forever to dry. The next day they were finally dry enough to sand down to a smooth finish and prep for paint. In case anyone is counting, I am on day 5 of the “quick afternoon” project. After sanding each chair with 220 grit sandpaper I wiped all of them down really well and applied the first coat of spray paint. Unfortunately, the instructions for the spray paint say not to apply the 2nd coat for another 2 hours. We are now on day 6 of the never ending project…
On a side note, I am OBSESSED with this fabric, isn’t it great?!
I applied the second coat and changed the fabric and I can finally say the chairs are finished!!! I love them, but if I had it to do over again, I would have used my sprayer from the beginning and looked a bit harder for a latex paint instead of the spray paint. It is much more difficult to get even coverage with the spray paint than with the spray gun.
Anyway… there’s the details of the never ending chair project. I am SO happy it is over and I love the impact they make in the dining room. Do all of your projects take way longer than they should?
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