Shabby Blue Chair

I'm so in love with this project. This started out as an old wooden chair I picked up at a garage sale last fall for $5. It was wobbly and dirty and not pretty at all, but I saw the potential. I've seen lots of chair makeovers on Pinterest, and I knew I could make this one adorable.

Here's the original chair - you can see it's a pretty plain little chair under all that Halloween stuff.

It sat on my front porch all winter until the weather was finally warm enough in late March to tackle this project.

To paint the chair, I followed the process outlined in The Everygirl Handbook: Repainting Furniture by Kate Riley and in Creating Your Masterpiece by Shaunna West. Both are incredible resources for convincing me that I could do this. You should definitely pick up those e-books if you want to paint some furniture.

So, to start with, I sanded the chair down a bit, just to clean it up and get the rough spots off. The seat was cracked across the middle and one of the cross-pieces in the legs was out of line. So we filled in the crack with glue (just plain old Elmer's) and used a hammer to gently tap the legs back into place.

Hubby used his clamps to hold the seat together while the glue dried.

Now it was time for the fun part - painting. I picked out a nice robin's egg blue from Home Depot - Blue Feather by Behr. It went on very pastel-ish but dried a bit brighter, just what I was hoping for. I gave it 2 coats of paints. I let it dry overnight between coats.

Then it was time to distress it. I used a little square of sandpaper to knock the paint off the edges in strategic places. Shaunna's ebook really explains this well - and she has a few videos to go along with the written process. Very, very helpful. I had fun with the distressing part - I think it looks just right for what I wanted.

I didn't stain or glaze this chair after distressing. I just loved how it looked with the blue paint and the wood showing through a bit. So I rubbed a wax sealant on top to finish it off and put it out on the porch. When my boys saw the finished chair, Jack sorrowfully told me, "Um, Mom, I'm sorry to tell you that the paint is already coming off." I had to laugh and explain that's how I wanted it to be.

It looks super cute on my porch - it adds just a little touch color for spring. And it makes me happy every time I look at it. :)

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