How I did my numbered chairs??

Since my post on my farmhouse table, I’ve had a lot of requests for a tutorial on how I did my painted number chairs . . .

Honestly, I’ve hesitated doing a post on them cause it was one of those things that didn’t turn out right the first time. So I hummed and hawed over it (for about a year!) and then tried something else. Fortunately that worked out and I really liked the finished project.

Thank goodness!

However, I would never say the way I went about it was the best way to do it. Nor the least cost effective . . . unfortunately. But I’ll show you what I did and if it helps someone else out, then great! If not, then at least you’ll know how to not go about refinishing your kitchen chairs ;)

So I started out with simple wood and white farmhouse chairs . . .

I had seen lots of similar tables done in black, so I decided I would keep the wood natural and just spray paint the backs and legs of the chairs black. I decided on spray paint because I knew I wasn’t going to actually be “painting” very much surface area. This is where you can learn from me. If I knew I would have ended up painting the entire chair, I would have brushed on the paint . . . much cheaper than the 12 cans of spray paint I ended up using! Yikes!

Also, I don’t know if you can see, but the backs of the chairs have lots of little (annoying!) spindles. And in order to keep the spray paint off the seats of the chairs, I had to meticulously tape off everything that wasn’t white. Wow! That was quite the job!! Did I mention how ANNOYING that was?! One would have been bad enough, but then times that by 6. Bleh.

Especially since in the end I painted the seats anyway!

Can you tell I’m still a little bitter about that? He he . . .

Okay so I taped off everything that wasn’t white with blue painter’s tape and newspaper, sanded down the white area, and then went over everything with a deglosser just for good measure . . .

At the time I was not planning on distressing the chairs, so I went ahead and used a grey spray primer as well. Again, if I knew I’d end up distressing the chairs, I would not have chosen to use primer at all.

Then I sprayed everything black.

Waited for it to dry and took off all the tape and black newspaper . . .

………

*crickets*

………

Um, let’s just say I was not in love.

I didn’t take any intentional after pictures, but I dug through my family pics and came across this one where you can *kind of* see what they looked like . . .

Don’t be swayed by the cutie patootie playing on it either! She was enjoying St. Patrick’s Day :) But I’d even tried distressing the black a bit to see if I would like it any better. Well, it only made it worse. The original white paint showed through way too much.

I tried to convince myself that I would love it in the end. So I went ahead and finished all six chairs. But it never was meant to be and all six of my chairs sat for a year and a half while I figured out what I was going to do with them now!

I really only had two choices . . . spray them all black OR strip the black and start all over. I felt like I’d already invested so much time getting them black that I would just stick with the black. Then one night while I was lying in bed (random, I know) I thought of painting numbers on the seats. I liked the idea right away and went for it!

So I bought another 4 more cans of black spray paint, prepped the seats and finished spraying all the chairs.

Next I painted the numbers on the chairs. I used the same method that I did for my painted canvases. I just print out the letter/number in whatever size I need, tape it in place, then trace around it using a paint marker. For the chairs I used the font Roundslab Serif that I downloaded from dafont. It’s one of my favorites!

Since painting the canvases, I also learned another helpful trick. When printing out your letter/number click “Outline” in the printing options. That way just the outline of the number prints out and you don’t end up using up all your black ink!

Then I just filled in the number with vintage white craft paint using some simple brushes I picked up at Wal=Mart.

I chose to go ahead and antique the number and distress the edges of the chair as well. But they would look good left as is too! I did a brown glaze over the number, but for the edges of the chair I just rubbed in some provincial stain and then wiped off the excess.

This helped because after distressing the edges, some of the original white paint of the chair showed through. After staining it, the white turned more cream and looked better with the rustic look of the chairs.

And last but not least, I finished everything off with some wipe-on poly.

As I’ve said before, I’m not in love with polyurethane, but in order for the black to not chip off and for the painted numbers to not come off when wiping up lots of spills, messes, crumbs, and sticky stuff (the life of a mom :) . . . I needed to use it. I chose the satin, and it’s held up well so far.

So there you have it! How I did my painted number chairs . . .

xoxo