November 5, 2009

Thanksgiving: the decor

*My sincerest apologies if you happened to visit during my bandwidth issues with Photobucket. All is restored!


Most of you know that I'm dishing up my first ever Thanksgiving dinner this year. As most you may not know, I use gatherings as an excuse/motivator to get my projects done. Aside from getting the house in order (we've only lived here a mere three weeks!) there were a few things I wanted to do before the family sat down at the table this year:

- Strip and repaint dinning room table and leaflet, including a protective top layer
- Paint dinning room chairs to match
- Get matching dishes (and enough of one set to serve everyone on)

The dinning room table was going to be a project in itself, but then I realized I didn't have enough chairs for everyone to sit on! Eep! Both my mother and grandma said that folding chairs would be just fine, but I refused to serve a somewhat fancy dinner with folding chairs at the table!

I wanted to go for a "Monica Geller-inspired" table set. You know:



All the un-matching chairs? Love the look, but I wanted something a liiiittle more polished. So, here's what I decided to do:

- Buy three un-matching chairs
- Use three of our current chairs
- Give them all a matching coat of paint

So, we visited a local estate sale warehouse, which I've been dying to snoop around in. We drive by it several times a week and it tempts me each and every time. It took me a couple sweeps of the store, but I managed to find three chairs that I thought would be perfect.



On the right is one of our current dining room chairs. Since they're already white, it just takes a couple coats of Rustoleum Glossy Black spray paint to get them in order. This guy still needs another coat of paint and a cushion.



I actually started with my favorite chair (shh! don't tell the others!) since I didn't have to do any real work on it. I absolutely love the curves of this chair. I've seen others like it for $100 a piece, but I snagged this baby for only $35!



Then I added a white seat cushion (Ikea, $6) and voila!



I swear the seat cushion isn't hanging off the side. That's flash and bad lighting for you.

This chair needed a lot of love, but it was only $15 and I was totally up for the challenge. I just cut out the center and jerry-rigged a seat cover. It won't really matter what it looks like since a cushion is going down over it.



The last chair is covered in wood putty. It had a lot of gouges and you could see a lot of the old seams coming through the wood. But I think once I get it sanded down and painted it will sparkle like new! And at only $20, it was worth the extra elbow grease.

Jason's been using the dinning room table to do a puzzle (so cute!) but I told him it was time to put it back in the box. I'm hoping to get it all stripped, sanded, and maybe even repainted by the end of the weekend. Then I can focus on some of the other fun things, like what kind of table scape am I going to do?

1 comment:

  1. How can you make this look so easy? I decided to paint my dining room table, chairs, buffet and hutch. Went to the local Home Depot. They said I shouldn't spray paint; I should paint with a brush. I sanded each chair for 2 hours and finally got 4 of the 6 chairs sanded completely. I started wondering if I was going to like the finished product, so decided to paint two of the chairs. I painted, then sanded with 80 grit then 220 grit sandpaper. Then used a tack cloth. Then painted the 2nd coat. Then did the same things again to paint the 3rd coat. Do I like it? NO! Even after careful preparation and three coats of paint, you can scratch the surface with your fingernail, and the paint comes off. And everywhere you touch the chair, you leave a grey-colored smudge. So what do I have now? I have a dining room suite that has been partially disassembled, part of it is painted and the other part is not painted. And with it looking the way it is now, it can’t be put back together to use. What a mess I have. I’m wondering if I can get a can of clear finish and spray the chairs to get the more glossy finish I was wanting. And maybe that will eliminate the grey smudgy places I get when I touch the chairs. They were painted 4 days ago, so they’ve had plenty of time to cure by now. I’ve got a mess. So this makes you appreciate folks like you that much more.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for dropping by! I love comments and I read each and every one of them. You can also contact me by e-mail if you want to chat!

"Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it."
~ Author Unknown

In other words: Be nice or I will delete you!