Priming the hated chairs...

by Dan on 14 August 2009

My original intention was to strip the finish off these chairs and then re-stain them. However, they have quite a bit of fine detail to them, and very few flat areas, so stripping them by hand ended up being time-consuming and painful (see here for my thoughts on that...).

So after about 3 years of procrastination on finishing the chairs, I decided to just give up and paint them.

To keep things as simple as possible, spray paint seemed to be the obvious choice. So after a trip to a Home Depot in the suburbs (Chicago Home Depots located in the city don't sell spray paint) we had three cans of gray primer and several cans of green spray paint.

I first lightly sanded the chairs and then cleaned them with some mineral spirits to make sure I had removed any leftover stripper. Here they are having fun in the summer sun:

Next up was to put down some plastic drop cloths and start putting the primer on. I had a friend help, and we decided it would be best to do the priming in two passes: once with the chairs upside down to get the hard to reach places, and then get the rest with the chairs standing up. One coat of primer seemed to do the job nicely.

I had my doubts about painting these guys, but I think they turned out pretty good... especially never having used spray paint before! A lot of paint ended up on the plastic sheeting, but I guess that's hard to avoid. I also found that I had a tendency to hold the can too close to the chairs, resulting in some dripping that I had to smooth out with a brush .

We originally hoped to do both priming and painting on the same day, but according to the primer and paint directions, we would have had to put on each successive coat within one hour or otherwise wait a full 24 hours for them to dry completely. And rather than stress ourselves out too much, we just decided to wait for another day...