Upcycled Dining Room Chairs

We've been working steadily along on the move to my new townhouse, and in between all the lugging, loading, unloading and sweating beyond belief, I've also been working on the new to me, upcycled dining room table and chairs. I did some research online, that stated Kilz Original Spray Primer would cut my time in half when it came to prepping the table/chairs for painting. It works amazingly. I filled in all of the dings I could with wood filler, sanded them down, sprayed the chairs with Kilz primer and went to town with the Rustoleum 2 coat coverage spray paint.

 Primed Chair

Even though the spray paint indicates that it's a two coat coverage, it still required a second coat. Ultimately you end up with areas of white primer still showing through, so it just makes sense to go over it again. It's taken about a can and a half to do two chairs.

Here is a glimse of what the finished chairs will look like with their new chair covering fabric. I haven't attached the seats yet because I want to clear coat protect them. I found out this week, thanks to mom, that Rustoleum makes a clear coat coverage spray too, and she got me two cans for the price of the normal sealer. I've finished one chair with that this evening and it looks amazing. Now we'll have somewhere cool to sit in the new apt. Watch my thrift blog for all of the fun new items i've come across recently that will coordinate in our new happening dining room/kitchen.

99/44 100% Drawers Don't stick anymore!

Here's a helpful little tip for everyone. Ivory Soap is not just for cleaning anymore, well I guess it never really was, but I thought this was a great solution. I just finished painting my desk, and annoyingly one drawer decided to stick where the paint met. I chalked it up to the wood being swollen from the extreme heat and humidity we've been having, but as it's cooled off the problem persisted. I went on the hunt for wax thinking if I waxed the drawer and lip where the paint was sticking the drawer would slide open more easily (kind of like using butter to get someones head stuck from between a banister or something). We'll I guess my mother realized what I was up too because she caught me just in time to not use the wax (which will melt and stick the drawer and desk together!! DUH right?!) and said, what I wanted was soap. I grabbed a bar of soap started to rub it on the desk, and what do you know the drawer opens now without sticking. AWESOME! I just had to share this really easy solution with everyone in case you had a similar situation going on in your home. 

:)

The Current State of Affairs...and Garage!

Let me start out by saying that I always start out with only the best intentions. I know my capabilities and talents, and yets what I don't seem to learn is my sense of time management. Right now I feel like my life is completely up in the air. I'm sure many of you have had this feeling before, like you've taken all the balls of your life and tossed them into the air, only to juggle them in the hopes of not letting anything drop. Well that's what I feel like, like I'm juggling. With all the responsibilites at work, and planning a move, I've gone and added more refinishing to my plate. I'm in this race to get as much done before I lose the use of a garage to do sanding and painting, and let me not even get into all of the sewing commissions I've gotten behind in because I lost twelve weeks of my life from a back injury. I can't be the only one that does this right? I hope there are some of you out there that do this too, because I'd hate to think I was alone.

So anyway, this week I realized that all the tables and chairs we currently owned were too big for the new townhouse, so that sent me on a search of craigslist to see what I could find, and to make a long story short, yesterday we picked up my "new to me" mid century modern dining table and chairs. They are a bit chippy and have seen some wear, but it's nothing that my capable woodfiller, sander, and can of spray paint can't fix. This is where the additional work comes in.

Here is a picture of the current state of the desk I've been working on for a few weekends now. I've lost track of the time and expense, but at this point, all it needs is two more coats of paint. I've finished all of the drawers and put the hardware back on them. For the picture I inserted one, so you could all see just how nice it's going to look. I plan on protecting the surface with a piece of Plexi-glass cut to size. I will first see if I can salvage that from the desk we are already using, and if it won't come clean, I'll just break down and have a new one cut. Jury is still out, but I should have that decided before the desk is in it's new home and the computer gets set up.

I want to take a minute here for a little product plug. Has anyone else tried this Frog Tape yet? I want to just say here that I will never, ever, ever use the blue painters tape again. This stuff does exactly what it says it does and I've never experienced such perfect, crisp paint lines with no bleeding under the tape, the stuff is amazing!!

Here is the current state of the garage! Lot's of furniture, lots of paint, lots of boxes.

And now, Introducing my new table and chairs! I am completely in love with Mid-Century Modern Design, so when I went on the search for a set, I started with Craigslist. This set is sturdy wood with a modern tapered leg. It has a drop leaf that extends the table larger if we need, but with the leaf down it's the perfect size for our new home. They have some nicks and dings, but I'm more than confident that they will all clean up with some tender loving care, new paint and new fabric. 

I've already picked out the paint, and bought four cans to start. This Rustoleum paint is amazing at covering in less coats ( I used it on some shutters for my table display and it was amazing), and I just couldn't resist the lure of the robins egg blue. I'll try to post pics as I go of the progress, but all of this furniture will start with the removal of seat cushions and a nice soapy wash down. Well I better sign off here. If I don't get painting soon, I won't finish any of these projects, and the weather will be getting hot and muggy, perfect for drying paint, but I don't want to be sweaty longer than I have too. :) 

Desk Prep

These are just some photos of the prepping process the desk has gone through over the last few weekends. Lot's of wood filler, lots of sanding. LOTS AND LOTS of sanding!

Desk Transformation

For the last four weekends I have been attempting to refinish a 1950's wooden desk that I have owned for about 11 years now. I got a great deal on it at a thrift store, and knew that I would eventually refinish it, but never got around to it. I've recently been motivated by the fact that we will be moving soon, and I won't have the use of a garage to do the level of sanding, furniture stripping, and painting that I've been used to up to this point, and since the apt. will be smaller this desk will become our computer desk in the main common area.

It had this horrible yellow veneer on it that took almost two weekends to sand through, before I gave up and bought a non-toxic paint stripper, which took 1/3 of the time to remove the veneer. Lesson learned, start there!

Since I was putting on a more modern looking hardware I also had to fill in some of the grooves that were in the drawers, but the wood filler worked well, and then required a bit more sanding.

The desk looked amazing when it was finally completely stripped of it's veneer, but it's at this point you learn a lot about the furniture's maker. For instance the desk is made from different types of wood, that when stripped are lighter and darker than each other.  Still it's a fabulous base to work from.

Yesterday I went over to The Home Depot and picked up a simple white semi-gloss enamel paint with a primer already in it, and put two coats on the drawers. With the 90+ degree heat we have been having the paint dried in no time. It's still going to take a few more coats, but I think at this point it's already a remarked improvement. We have a bit of a cool front that came through today, so I'm heading down in a few to tack cloth the desk body itself and then start painting that. With any luck I should have this all done and ready before we start to move in the next few weeks.

After this there's only a few small spray paint projects left, and I will be all finished with the backed up refinishing projects I've accumulated over the last few years!

From Ugly to Gorgeous in Seven Coats

Finished Mirror with Butterfly Decals

I've been working at my current position at R.I.T. now for five years, and in all that time, perhaps more, there has been, hanging on the wall this mirror. This big, brown, plastic mirror. I've been staring at it for five years, and every time I look at it, it makes me cringe. Well yesterday I took it off the wall, brought it home, and took it apart. Then I brought out my current most favorite creative tool in the world! Ready for it? Insert Drumroll here!

That's right! Krylon Indoor/Outdoor Gloss White spraypaint! I'm in love with this stuff. So anyway, now that ugly brown, plastic frame is white. It looks absolutely amazing! It's gone from Ugly to Gorgeous in only seven coats.

It's almost ready to be reassembled. I'm going to use the last two butterfly transfers left over from the chair on the mirror itself. I bet now there will be fights over it at work! It will impossible to miss now on the carpeted, cement, BROWN (!) walls.

Mary Shrine from an old Sewing Machine Drawer

I have a laundry list of projects that I have been working on trying to finish up now that I can get back to them, and one was the shrine for a beautiful Italian Mary statue that yes, I did get at a thrift store a few years back. My best friend mentioned that she had picked up a bunch of old sewing machine drawers and I asked if I could have one. It is exactly the right size to house Mary safely on the wall. The drawer was old with holes in the front and top, had a sticker stuck to it, and layers of varnish. It was a mess, but had amazing potential. I started by using WD-40 to get the old sticker off, washed the drawer and filled in the holes with wood filler. Once that was all set, a few rounds of elbow grease and course sandpaper did it's trick on the varnish, and wood filler. All the sides were now smooth and even, and ready to accept the paint. I used a sapphire blue metallic acrylic paint. It took almost five coats, but when the light hits it, it just gleams. It's the perfect color for Mary, don't you think?

I then had to figure out how to decorate the box itself. It deserved something simple, soft and pretty. I drilled two holes in the back inside (formally bottom of the drawer) in order to put the screws in later when it would hang on the wall. In order to cover those, I used a piece of matte board, cut to the size of the back (formally bottom) and covered it with batting and a beautiful snippet of a blue and white floral Waverly sample I've had sitting around. I taped the batting and fabric to the board and slipped it in. It pops out easily for quick removal from the wall if need be. Then it was onto the sides of the box. They were too plain, and the blue was a bit too intense. I picked up some white craft doilies, and glued those to the sides of the box. Then I used the same Waverly fabric to make different sized floral yo-yo flowers with a bead in the center. I'm very happy with how the whole thing turned out. Now I'm looking for a Buddha figure because I'm envisioning him in a box of his own, perhaps, I'm thinking, in copper!

From Caterpillar to Butterfly, My Adventures with a .99 cent chair

This is the adventure of the .99 cent thrift store chair. It all started one afternoon on a Sunday at the Volunteers of America Store on Jefferson Road in Henrietta. My mother and I had attempted to make a short trip wandering around the store. Unfortunately at the time I was experiencing severe pain in my back and leg due to a fractured disc fragment embedded in my sciatic nerve. That's a pain I don't wish on anyone. I wandered over into the furniture section and found this funny little lonely chair all by itself. I noticed how the price of the chair had been increasingly marked down, and plopped down, letting mom wander the rest of the store until she was done and came back to find me. This ugly little chair turned out to be one of the most comfortable chairs I've ever sat in. It's soft and has exactly the right amount of lower and upper back support. I had heard somewhere that there was vinyl spray paint, so I decided I would give it a chance at a new life. Mom hoisted it into the cart to roll it to the register, and I asked the cashier if it really truly was only .99.

She said it was my "lucky day!" She has no idea how right she was. 



The Mark Down

The Big Reveal!!! TA DA!!!

Once we got the chair home, my friend Richard helped me take it apart. It was dismantled right down to the frame, which was in very bad, very rusty shape! I also asked his advice about vinyl spray paint, since he knows a lot about cars, I'd figure that he had heard of the stuff. He confirmed my suspicions and told me what to look for at the auto parts store. I only knew one thing. That the seat and back should be white. Everything looks better white. I also planned to leave the arm rests wooden. We went to the auto parts store and they had every color except white, so I ended up buying the Rustoleum vinyl paint online from amazon. It took four cans to cover, but it worked relatively well.

Once I get a hold of a can of spray paint, it's very hard for me to resist the urge to stop spraying things, so I thought hey, why not have the arm rests white too? I had some Krylon spray paint left over from another project and set to work putting a few coats onto that, once I'd given them a good sanding.

The one thing I didn't count on was the chair seats sticking to my table surface due to the humidity. I ended up with a few areas that peeled away from the surface of the seat, and no amount of re-spraying was going to cover the indentations it caused so I had to come up with a way to cover these areas. It took me two days to come up with the idea to use vinyl wall decorations they sell at home decoration stores. The only criteria was that the images needed to be big to cover the peeled paint. I initially thought great big flowers would work, but in the end went with the butterflies which had a softer feel to them. For the most part they adhered very well to the seat surface, but to be safe I spray sealed them with a clear sealer. Again Krylon came to the rescue.

Then it was time to attack the frame. I went back to the auto parts store where I saw a heavy duty auto grade Krylon Chrome spray paint. I bought three, because I didn't know how it covered. The frame was horribly rusty, so I had to attack it with a wire brush, and a tack cloth. Then I set about to paint. OMG!! I fell in love with that paint. It only took less than a half a can to cover, and it looked amazing. It did however give off a nice fine chrome colored powder if you touched it, so again I rubbed it down with a soft cloth, to get as much of that off as possible and attacked it with three coats of the clear sealer.

Then is was just a matter of screwing it all back together! I think it came out amazing. It's not perfect but then again, what is. It is however beautiful, functional, and super comfy. It ended up costing almost 45.00 in the end to revamp it, but it was totally worth it. It will be less if I take back the two cans of chrome spray paint (but I really don't want too! anyone want something chrome painted...lol) ;)

This is the finished chair. It has gone from caterpillar to butterfly, and it only took four months!

What do you think?