A Work In Progress

A while back I was 'ah fixin' up these chairs as Wild Bill says. They were a bland light wood color to start. I got 6 of these chairs and the matching square dining table, with leaves, for $75 on Craigslist! A real steal in my opinion, but not in Wild Bill's because so far only these 2 chairs have been put to use. The other 4 chairs and the table are still taking up room in the garage while I wait for inspiration to hit me. In the picture above, one chair is in stage one -- painted with red primer -- and the other is in stage two -- painted with black paint over the red primer. This picture is the chair in stage three -- with a second coat of black paint.

I wanted to paint the chairs white or black. I decided on black when I found the only "brush on" primer I had was a can of red primer and it was late and I was already in my pajamas. A trip to town was out of the question and so was using "spray on" paint due to the weather and the late hour, so brush on was necessary. If in your mind you're asking "why not white?" clearly you've never tried to cover up red with white paint.

I had this round table, which was purchased a couple of years ago at Pottery Barn (PB) for half off ($500 instead of $1000) because there are scratches on the top from PB using it for display. Wild Bill offered to take the scratches out, but it's made to look distressed anyway so the scratches don't matter to me.

Even though I painted the chairs black, it amazed me how much they matched the table and a bench I already had, so I put them all together in the breakfast room. Now, I'm not the matchy-matchy type (this is an understatement)...but we had the house up for sale so I decided to leave the chairs looking brown.

I made a make-shift bench cushion out of a king-size quilt I had, and put the matching shams on each end. These were another steal, by the way, from Marshalls.

For temporary chair seats I just used pieces of a Home Depot paint drop cloth. I didn't even take time to wash and soften it. It would've looked so much better if I had. Man, this is like showing my dirty laundry!

Before I had time to cut up the quilt to recover the chairs and cushion, the house sold and I packed these all up and put them in storage. Yesterday I moved the bench into our new garage and I'm 'ah fixin' to reinvent it in the new house. I definitely need to get the sewing machine out of storage and make something better for the cushion and chair seats.

I'm linking to Debbiedoo's Newbie blog party for new bloggers or those with under 100 followers. Go there and check out some pretty great blogs:

http://debbie-debbiedoos.blogspot.com/2011/03/stenciling-burlap-new-project-to-share.html