Just whose idea....

....was it to start painting chairs? Okay, it was mine.

The red/white/purple chairs in the breakfast room look so nice (thanks to friend C) that I decided to try painting two small chairs that I had up in the library.  Thankfully, I started just on one of them.... both of those old wooden chairs came from yard sales.  When we lived in Clear Lake, the child-sized chairs were kept on the screen porch, and my cats loved sitting on them. In this house, I put them up in the third floor library, near the bookcases with my collection of children's books. They looked perfect up there, but of course, couldn't compare with my newly-painted chairs here in the breakfast room.

So when I went to Walmart this week, I bought some paint, brushes, foam-circle-things to make polka-dots, and I was determined to make those chairs as happy as the ones that C painted.  Silly me.  I'm not exactly a painter.  Of course, C is a painter and she knows what she's doing with a can of paint and a brush.

I started with the largest of the two chairs.... painted the whole thing white. "Is that your canvas?" my husband wanted to know.  Indeed it was.... I had visions of pink and purple and black, with white polka-dots.  One coat of pink later, it wasn't as pink as I thought it would be.  "You probably need to give that two coats," said my husband.  (Damn, said I.)  Wouldn't you think that a dark pink going over white would take just one coat of paint?

Three coats later.... and the pink paint on that chair is close to my vision of what I thought it would look like.  Then I got started with the purple paint.  The first coat has dried..... it will need a second coat.... and the seat of the chair will probably need three coats of the purple.  At the rate I'm going, it will be mid-June before that chair is ready for the white polka-dots.

My husband noticed some drip-marks in the pink paint of the chair. I explained to him that those drips were there before I started to paint.  "Well, you could have taken some sandpaper and smoothed that over," he said.  Well. I guess I could have done just that. But I didn't think about it. (Where does one learn all of these painting rules?)  My husband suggested that I could still sand it down.  Are you kidding me? And ruin three coats of pink?  (My plan is to put a polka-dot over each of those drip-marks....)

I'm hoping that my pink/purple/white/black chair will look nice when it's finished. At the very worst, I will have wasted some paint, and a whole lot of time.  If the chair really looks un-worthy of my library when I'm done, I will take the sandpaper and sand it all down, polka-dots and all, and then buy a can of flat-white spray paint, spray the heck out of that little chair, and start all over again.

I'm blaming this painting episode on Pinterest.  Everything looks so easy on that site.... do a search on painted chairs.... look at all the pretty possibilities.... buy some paint and brushes.... and voila! What does one have?  A little chair that looks nothing at all like the beautiful painted chairs on Pinterest.