What I Did On My Vacation

When we went to the Chicago area in February for our littlest grandson's 2nd birthday, we took a dining room set up to his parents. I've said before that I was "heavy" in tables, soooo although this was such a good buy a few years ago (Craigslist $75 for a table with six chairs) I really needed to let it go to a home that needed it.

I had painted the four legs about a year ago, but never got around to the table top. Here's the ugly orange wood color the table and six chairs were.

We had to hunt around in the garage to find the rest of the table and four of the chairs were up in the attic.

Once we got the dining room set to our daughter's freshly painted dining, someone couldn't decide if she wanted to paint the chairs white or black. I had painted two of the chairs black a year ago, so we started painting a couple of chairs white to get an idea of how they would look.

Here's the dark chairs. They looked a little masculine, so our daughter decided to cover them with some gray striped material.

Sorry about the size of this picture! I could not get it to a bigger size so I gave up...

As you can see, we painted the other four chairs white along with the table. Our daughter decided on a floral fabric that we used the 'wrong' side on as it was a little more subdued. The room has three pictures of the Chicago skyline and we (and I probably mean I) kind of got into the idea of business clothes for the chairs...floral skirt for the girlie ones and men's pinstripe for the guys. The cost of the material was about $15 (one and a quarter yard of striped and one and a quarter yard of floral), which put this project just under $100 since we used leftover chalk paint and homemade chalk paint using 2/3 paint to 1/3 gesso a la Villa Barnes' recipe.

I know ya'll are saying why didn't we distress and age down the table and white chairs, right? Well, daughter hadn't decided whether to keep the set white or paint it black by the time we left, so I told her we'd distress and stain them if they're still white next time we visit. Believe me when I say it just might take that long for her to make that dicision since she's lived in her house for about 6 or 7 years without any dining room furniture because they couldn't decide what they wanted!

I'm partying at these blog parties this week. Home you'll come over and check out the other blogs:

http://thebrambleberrycottage.blogspot.com

http://bec4-beyondthepicketfence.blogspot.com