Paint it White

Remember our check list of projects we can tackle before the move? Well, we can officially check off two more! This has been the perfect weekend to do some home projects, what with it being 30 degrees and snowy almost all day yesterday.... (Seriously, on Friday, it will be APRIL. Shouldn't the snow knock it off by now??). We took what surely was our first trip of many, many more to the hardware store yesterday to pick up some primer, some white paint, brushes and a drop cloth in order to get two big projects completed.


Commence: Operation "Paint it White."


I've got a vision for our living room and "French room" (Yes, we have a room we are calling the "French room," not because it will be inspired by France, nor because were particularly like French things, but because it's got French doors and we aren't fancy enough to call it a "parlor."). Included in that vision are some white accents. The only problem is, we don't have any white furniture, and as our motto is "Chic but cheap," our option was to paint what existing furniture we have.


Beginning with this chair:

Eric picked this chair up at a thrift store a few years ago and for the past two years it's been serving as my "pull-up helper" during P90X. This thing is in good shape (I mean, that's what two years of training with Tony Horton will do to you), but it just needed a little love and updating.

As soon as we brought the chair out to work on it, Mr. Pancakes expressed his interest in "helping."

We realized there would be certain disaster if we let Mr. Pancakes hang around, so sadly he was quarantined in the bedroom during most of the afternoon (Don't worry, he had food, his litter box and his favorite toys - rubber bands - to keep him happy).

We started off by removing the seat to make life easier, then sanded the wooden frame with 120-grit sandpaper - by hand. After a while, we realized this was a job for the power sander.

Eric did most of the sanding. But I got to try out the sander, too. Gee, I feel just like Bob Vila!

After the whole thing was sanded, we wiped it down with a damp rag and let it dry for a couple of minutes.


Then, we began priming the chair. When we were done priming, we realized the back of the chair was going to be a big issue when trying to paint the frame. The problem is, the thing wasn't easily removable. We took out a couple of screws, but the bottom was cling to some sort of dowel rod. 

So we simply just kept the back on, but tilted it back so we'd have easier access to the frame lining the chair back.

After the primer was dry, we each grabbed a foam brush, dipped it in some interior semi-gloss white paint, and went to work. The first coat went on pretty thinly, as did the second. But by the third coat, we thought we had a pretty-good finished product on our hands.

I was amazed how the simple white paint gave new life to this chair. The white really brought out the curves to the frame and made the chair look fresh, modern and way more expensive than it really was. But even though the chair looks great as is, it's not done yet! Oh no, my friends. This chair is going to go through another transformation, and I'm really excited about the final FINAL product. I just can't reveal it until May.... so hold on tight until then!

Our second project was painting a couple thrift-store tables white. One of these tables currently holds our record player and receiver in the dining room, and the other holds my sewing machine in the bedroom. I'll get to those projects in another post, but I'm already excited about how amazing they'll look in our new house!

Have you done any furniture transformations with a simple coat of paint? I'd love to see your examples!