Kitchen Chair Refresh

Hello everyone! Happy Sunday! So today I am here to show you the beginnings of a little home improvement project that I've been wanting to do for years. I have always liked the look of mismatched kitchen chairs all painted the same color and had been interested in doing that in my own kitchen. Well, 3 years after acquiring said chairs, I'm finally getting going on that project! This weekend I did the painting process to two of the chairs and I'll be showing you the more detailed process on one of them.

I'll be honest that this project really required me to go out of my comfort zone a bit in terms of prep work. I have always hated doing the appropriate prep work for more in depth projects. I usually just employ a "go for it" approach. However, as these kitchen chairs will likely be used on a somewhat regular basis, I wanted to take the time to prep them as best as I could.

Here's the "before" of one of the chairs:

As I wanted to paint these chairs black, the biggest step for me was removing as much of the varnish as possible so that the paint would adhere well to the chair. I decided to try a combination of using a Gel paint stripper, a hand sander and some sandpaper. Here is the paint stripper I used:

I applied the gel to the chair seat and after letting it sit and scraping off the varnish with a scraper, this is what I was left with.

I then went over the entire chair with a hand sander and sandpaper to get as much of the remaining varnish of as I could.

I will say that I found the gel stripper to be very effective and it 100% did its job, but I did not use it going forward on this project as I thought it would have been extremely hard to clean out all of the nooks and crannies of the chair. I ended up using just the hand sander and sandpaper going forward for the other chair. This worked out well as I was most worried about making sure that the chair seat was free of any varnish. It was impossible for me to get all of the varnish off every curve and spindle of the chair, but I was not too worried. As the seat itself would be the "highest traffic" area of the chair, I wanted that to be cleaned off the best.

Now onto painting. Due to the aforementioned nooks and crannies, I though that spray paint would be the best option for giving the chairs an even coat of paint. I went for an outdoor spray paint as I thought this would increase the durability. I also used a light coat of a satin varnish over everything once I was done. But we will get to that later!

So I gave the chairs about 3 all-over coats of the spray paint, which averaged about an entire can per chair. Once that was dry, I brought the chairs inside and added some "grubiness." I have always been a fan of an aged and antiqued look so I took some sandpaper to create some worn areas where the original wood peeked through. I also used a dry brush with some white paint to add some aged details in a few areas. I love a grubby look and I also find that it takes away some of the stress of keeping things perfect. If the chair was made to look a little beat up and well-loved anyway then its less upsetting if it gets a ding or scratch here and there. Here's a few photos of areas that I distressed. It doesn't come across very effectively on camera, but I hope that you get the idea!

Once I was done distressing, I went over with a thick coat of the satin varnish I showed above. I did feel pretty confident that the outdoor paint was strong enough on it's own, but thought that a little extra protection couldn't hurt. So here are the 2 chairs that I've completed!

I love how they look and am very excited to get the other two chairs I have completed! In all honesty, I didn't get the other two done this weekend because I ran out of spray paint and although it was relatively easy, it was a tiring and arduous process. So time to take a break and do the others when my additional paint comes from Amazon!

What do all of you think? Are you a fan of the mismatched chair look or do you prefer when things match? Let me know in the comments below!

 - Rebecca