Hey Bernice!

It’s official, salvaging furniture from the side of the road and restoring or transforming it is a hereditary trait.

Many months ago I mentioned to Mum that I wanted to replace the bench seats along the side of our dining table with six chairs.

I wanted the change-over to coincide with our move into our new house, but hadn’t seen anything I would be happy to spend money on. Being the thinker that she is, mum suggested that I re-use the chairs she was storing in the garage (my sister was holding on to them for a future use – yet to be determined!). So off we went to the garage to inspect them… they were perfect.

I loved the spokes, and the character they would bring to the house.
I had actually pinned an image onto one of my Pinterest boards of very similar chairs, but painted red.

I was later informed by my 86-year-old grandmother that she and my grandfather had found these chairs on the side of the road, took them home and painted them green. They then finished them with special paint (that was apparently all the rage in the 1980’s) that gave them an antique look. This is when I realised that my love for transforming curb-side furniture has been passed down two generations!

Without a second-thought I loaded the chairs into the car, took them home and started to think about what I would do with them:

– Strip the paint off them myself (which I tried to do with one chair and gave-up when there were more than four coats of paint on them!)

– Pay someone to strip them for me (I was hesitant to do this because I didn’t think the quality of the wood would be worth the effort or cost)

– Paint over the multiple coats of paint they had already received.

I decided to paint over them, but what colour? I pondered on this for some time.
I really wanted to go a bright colour (was thinking duck-egg blue), but I knew I would get sick of it after a while… so I decided to paint them the same colour we had chosen as our wall paint. Solver “talc’ in an enamel gloss.

If you have ever painted anything with circular shape: a pole, tube, prong, round table/chair leg you will sympathise with me when I say it was a long, tedious and difficult job. To get the paint to cover the surface evenly was extremely challenging – it took me ages (and three coats on all six chairs). Each chair now has about seven coats of paint from all the transformations they have endured over the years!

Just as well they look wonderful around the table in our new home, or the effort would not have been worth it….

On the wall in this image you will see another project I am working on, burlap covered canvases with butterflies cut from atlas pages and metal – I’m not sure about it, so leaving it there to decide if I change it to birds instead (more about this in a future post).

We’ve found since changing from benches along each side of the table that we use the table more. It is less effort to pull out a chair to sit at the table. The benches were not ideal when entertaining – you couldn’t turn your chair slightly to face the person next to you when talking. All round a successful project, albeit the painting was extremely time-consuming.

Cheers,

Bernice