spraypainting into the wind.

two weekends ago, i decided to take advantage of the nice spring weather to do a little spraypainting. what can i say? spraypaint just makes everything better. plus, something needed to be done about the fact that our house has been operating for far too long under a BYOC policy (Bring Your Own Chair) and only getting worse.

lately, the community group that meets at our house every week has been growing, and the cheap chairs that we had from my apartment were starting to bite the dust, so we were quickly reaching a point where something needed to be done about our seating situation before someone tried to sit down and ended up crashing to the floor. somehow i dont think that kind of reputation would do much to encourage new people to join our group. we needed new chairs. and we needed them now. and since the new dining room table and chairs that we want will take 8-12 weeks to get to our house, we decided to just work with what we had for now.

surprise! we actually had more chairs in our house after all! these two chairs were ones that were left with the house when we bought it. they were a little bit wobbly and we didnt know what to do with them at the time, so we just stacked them in our laundry area of the basement and have been storing our paper towels on them for over a year and a half. 

after i tightened up the chairs a little with a ratchet, i started them out with two cans worth of primer. it was a little splotchy, but already an improvement.

i hardly waited the reccommended drying time, because i was excited to get to the main event: the color! after a little bit of deliberation in the spraypaint aisle, (and a couple funny looks from the hubs) i brought home several cans of this fun shade of purple. i think its technical name is Aubergine and i think its gorgeous.

i managed to get two cans worth of paint on the chairs before my hand got permanently stuck and my pointer finger refused to do any more work. so i had to wait a few days so that my hand could recover, the weather could rain a little an then get nice again, and i had a chance to buy more spraypaint.

the chairs took another can and a half of paint (thats 3.5 total) before they were completely covered. under different conditions, they probably could have been done with less paint than that, but i ended up losing a good bit of my paint in the wind that refused to calm down for me, no matter how much i pleaded.

the color is admittedly a little bold, but the chairs really look good in pretty much every room of the house. (except for maybe our room and the bathroom) even Mark has decided that they look awesome, now that he has seen the finished product.

i finished these guys up over this past weekend with two-and-a-half cans worth of glossy clear coat. all told, it took me two nice weekends and a semi-cooperative week in between to get enough paint on these chairs so that all of their nooks and crannies got covered. and thanks to the windier-than-i-would-have-hoped-for conditions, and in spite of wearing gloves and long sleeves, i think it'll take me at least that long before i'm able to scrub all the stray spraypaint off of my wrists.

our community group is coming over tonight, so i'm excited to see our 'new' chairs in action. i'll be sure to let you know if they end up being a total flop if for some reason they fall apart as soon as someone sits down, but they're really pretty solid so i dont see that being an issue.

anyone else out there love themselves some spraypaint? just me? cuz i may or may not have already had another spraypaint project all lined up before i even finished this one... but that doesnt make me an addict... right?