Like so many other projects in our house, this one is about saving money. But, also like so many projects, it shows that you don’t need a big budget for a big impact. When we first moved into our house, we used the dining room table that we had purchased originally for our townhouse. It was about 5 feet long and looked absolutely ridiculous in the large space we had for our dining room. The challenge of an open concept living space is that there needs to be designated areas for each “room,” i.e. the dining room, living room, entryway, etc. So, we wanted to make sure the dining room space was filled properly and didn’t look like a large, cavernous portion of our home with a teeny tiny table in it. Below is a picture I quickly snapped of our old table that doesn’t exactly portray the silliness but gives you an idea. 

To find something a bit more appropriate, we did what we usually do and hopped on Facebook marketplace. We quickly found this great table for a bargain price. 

But the new challenge was that we had a giant table and no chairs. I wasn’t really liking the look of our old Eames-style chairs in this space and we didn’t have enough, anyway. Back to the marketplace! It was pretty easy to find a set of 10 of these traditional oak chairs that are pretty much everywhere.

I knew from the start that I’d refinish them at some point, I just wasn’t sure how. So, a year went by and I we had many more projects to finish, and the chairs fell to the back burner (there sure are a lot of things on that poor burner). We had the general idea that we would sand them all down and stain them with a dark or black stain followed by polyurethane to make sure they had a nice, durable finish. Eventually, we decided to try and sand down just one test chair to determine if our idea was realistic. Spoiler alert: it was not.    

About 5 minutes into the sanding, I was ready to give up. There are SO MANY little nooks and crannies on these chairs. Sanding down one completely took nearly an hour, and it was still impossible to get it perfect. Nick is much braver and more patient than I, and I even saw his resolve waver a little when I reminded him that we had NINE more to do. I was also coming to the realization that staining and getting poly in all these little spaces would be such a chore. Nick tried sanding down a few more, but eventually we let the project fall off our radar. And another embarrassing amount of time passed. So much time, actually, that looking at the half-sanded, yellow-colored wooden chairs every day eventually started to make my eye twitch. 

One day when Nick was at work and I had the day off, my (twitching) eye caught a can of spray paint that we left out from another project sitting right on one of the poorly sanded chairs. LIGHTBULB. Why not just spray paint these monsters?! We’ve spray painted many things in our house, and the finish is usually pretty durable if you use a good quality paint. I decided even if it wasn’t as durable as stain and poly, it was worth it to not have to look at this travesty anymore. Look, I’m sure someone is reading this thinking, why would you spray paint that nice wood?? And I hear you. I usually hate seeing someone putting a coat of paint over a beautiful piece of wooden furniture. But you have to understand that these chairs are not beautiful or antique furniture. They’re cheap, poorly made chairs that are pretty much a dime a dozen. I decided there was no harm in trying to make them work better for my space. And I’m so glad I went for it because it worked, and I love them so much now! Read below if you’re considering defacing your own nice wooden chairs. Just kidding, it’s only paint! Go for it! Life’s too short to have chairs you hate in your house, I say.  

Process and Supplies

Spray paint

220 grit sandpaper

Cleaner and rag

Gloves

mask

I started each chair by giving it a quick sand with 220 grit sandpaper. For the ones that were already sanded, I just wanted to make sure there was a nice, uniform finish with no sanding marks in weird directions. I made sure to sand in the direction of the wood grain to avoid this. For the ones we hadn’t sanded, I just wanted to give the surface a little buff to make the paint stick better. Then I gave each one a good cleaning. There were a lot of grime and sanding dust on these, and spray paint tends to highlight any irregularities in texture. 

Then it was time for paint. I first put on rubber gloves. There’s nothing worse than scrubbing spray paint out from under your nails for days. And, of course, a mask and well-ventilated area are musts for spray painting. For the first chair, I kept it upright as I painted and had to reach around legs and contort at weird angles to try and hit every spot. My joints told me that was a stupid plan. By the next chair, I realized the best move was to put it upside down and thoroughly coat the bottoms before flipping it back to do the top. This worked much better. I was sure to do very light coats to avoid drippage. I tried to do the harder spots first, like the spindles on the back, because I had to spray these more times and I wanted to avoid too much build-up on the surrounding areas. The spray paint only takes about a minute to dry between coats, so the whole process goes pretty fast. I would say it was about 20 minutes for one chair. MUCH better than the hours one chair would take to sand down completely, stain, and poly. 

Then we added some plastic chair slides to make them slide better on the carpet and we were done! And here’s the final result.

Every time I walk into my living room, I just feel relief now. It’s sooo right. Some of the chairs that we had sanded more extensively ended up with a little bit of a weird texture under the spray paint. So, if you’re considering doing a project with similar chairs, my advice would be to leave them unsanded except for a light coat to help the paint stick. We also have no idea how well they’ll hold up. Certainly, they’ll be more susceptible to bumps and dings than stain and poly. But that’s character, right?? And honestly, it’s worth it to just have this project finished and off our over-loaded back burner.