A while ago I posted this chair that I love:
I like the simple lines and especially the fact that it was bi-colored and BLUE (my favorite accent color). It looked like an easy, quick project so I definitely wanted to DIY one for my house. I checked out a couple donation stores and found a chair at Goodwill for $10 that I thought I could work with:
The lines weren’t as clean as I wanted, but I thought that if it didn’t look the way I wanted after I was done with it, I could always give it to the kids for their treehouse (which is where all our cast-offs go). I wanted to paint the bottom gold and the top coral since even though I love blue, I’ve learned that I have to stay away from blue as much as I can since that is my go-to color and my house is at risk of looking like the Smurfs live here if I’m not careful!
The first step was to get all the gloss off the wood with a liquid de-glosser. I used TSP de-glosser that I picked up at Home Depot.
I wanted the bottom of the chair to be gold because the chair was going in the foyer and right next to the foyer is my living room which has gold accents and I wanted the two spaces to relate to each other. So, I flipped the chair upside down in the grass and started spray painting the legs using Rustoleum gold spray paint.
I sprayed about 10 very light coats and let the coats dry for about 10 minutes between coats. I was so happy with the results after I was done because the legs were shiny, bump free, and drip free. I high-fived myself for picking a project that was easy and awesome but then came painting the top part, and soon I was kicking myself in the rear!
I decided to use latex paint for the top of the chair because I couldn’t find the color that I wanted in spray paint; although I did find a website where you give them the paint color from any manufacturer and they make spray paint out of it but it was really expensive (like $20 a can) and I wanted this to be an inexpensive project. So, latex paint is what I worked with and after lots of headaches and drips and sanding and time and cursing, I came up with:
It was way too light on the top and when my husband saw it and said, “I didn’t know you were going for the old lady South Beach look,” I knew I needed to reevaluate the color. So after spending about three hours painting this atrocious color, I went back to Home Depot and picked out a brighter version and got this:
This was too dark and sadly, still ugly so I lightened it:
Still terrible. And at this point, I had so many coats on the chair that there were bumps, brush marks, drips and general ugliness.
Even if the color was perfect, which it wasn’t, I couldn’t live with all those imperfections! I even tried thinning out the latex paint before painting and the paint still globbed in lots of places, so I did the only rational thing and spent the next 2 days stripping all paint that wasn’t gold. I used Citristrip which is an environmentally friendly gel stripper and had to apply 3 coats since I had so many coats of paint to strip.
After stripping the chair, and going to 5 different stores, I found a spray paint that would work called Coral Isle by Krylon and after another 10 coats I finally got it right with no bumps, drips, globs, and no cursing!
See how the gold in the chair relates to the gold mirror and accents in the living room?
I even found a cute little pillow at Target for $5 that I think goes well with the chair.
The next step is to add some art above the chair with blue accents to break up all that coral a little. In the spirit of trying to do this with as little cash as possible, I’m going to DIY the artwork and already have some ideas that I think might work. I’ll let you know when I come up with something that is share-able!
Notes from this project: USE SPRAY PAINT!!! It leaves no brush marks and if you spray light coats, no drips. I will for evermore use spray paint to refinish furniture because I value my sanity.
