What do you do when you have 7 kids and a table that has tried it's best to hold up, but just looks pitiful? You give it a makeover. I'm what I like to call a jack of all trade, master of none. My famous line is "how hard can it be?" I will tackle any project. I jump right in and don't look back. my friend is not the jumping type, that's why she has me.
Look at that poor sad micro fiber cushion. It has seen way too many spills to be resurrected as is. We started with the least scary project. Recovering the cushions. I helped my friend from here by going to the fabric store and taking some photos so that when she went there in AZ she would know what she was looking for and doing. I had her buy outdoor fabric because it will hold up to the use much better.
We just rotated from playing with the kids to doing projects and sometimes we tried to do both at the same time. It was pretty stinking hot there in AZ so keeping the energy level up was a bit of a challenge. I recovered the cushions at night while the older kids swam and Jo put little ones to bed. When she got the kids to bed she joined me and I showed her how to cover the cushions. She preferred the supervising role, but I think she did at least one cushion.
Next up was playing with my new favorite technique. Chalk paint. This stuff is amazing and awesome and I will never paint any other way again.....who am I kidding, am I really going to paint anything else? Who knows, it got me thinking about redoing the top of my kitchen table. It is black and pretty roughed up and crappy looking. I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it....maybe red....I love red.
Anyway, you don't have to prep when you are using chalk paint, but most of the chairs had to be glued back together so they were semi- sanded. Here is the recipe
1/4 cup plaster
1/4 cup very hot water
mix until dissolved
add 2-4 cups paint (I used 3)....any kind you want....we used flat
After 2-4 coats of paint that have dried between, sand the roughness off to either an antique look or a solid look. The fewer coats, the more it will antique.
We went for a 2 tone effect on the table. Jo originally wanted black, but after consulting my guru friend, we decided against it. Black is way too hard to work with and you need to be more of a professional skill level. We went with brown instead.
Now, what I didn't mention to my friend as I helped her pick out the brown colors that went with her new fabric was that I was a wee bit worried that it was going to end up looking like something out of the 70's, but I'm a jumper, so I jumped.....then when we were done I told her that I was worried.
Because this is a heavy use application, we couldn't just wax it. We had to apply 2-4 coats of poly...sanding between each coat. I'm telling you, my neck and back were killing me as well as the heat and the sheer volume of work to be accomplished. The last couple of days we discovered that if we jumped in the pool before we started working, we stayed cooler. We were just sweating buckets and then changing into our suits and jumping in when we were done ( I actually packed painting clothes- because I'm awesome like that)
That last picture is the 2 coats of poly on the chairs, so they were done and there was 1 coat on 1 panel of the table to show what it looks like with poly. I think she is going to be so happy and pleased with this transformation. It looks pretty sharp, if you ask me. Hopefully she can finish up what we started while I was there. There just wasn't enough energy and hours of the day to finish it before I left. Too much drying time and sanding and painting for 8 chairs and a table.
BTW we just used foam brushes for the application. The only thing I rolled was the table top and I used a cabinet roller brush for that. I was worried that it would dry stipply because of how it rolled on, but it didn't. I also liked that it kept the paint from going in the lines of the table- if those would have been painted, I think it would have looked awful when dirt started getting stuck in there. I also worried about the poly bubbling up a bit because of the foam brush, but those dried out as well - you do have to be super careful about drips though- same with the paint.
Hopefully they hold up to the kids.
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