Before and After Series, Part 5 - New project and a tutorial (sort of)

Well, I mentioned my broken chair in a previous before/after post and since it's been finished for a week now, I decided it was time to go ahead and post the photos. I managed to remember to take photos of each step, but only after each step was done, so we'll call this a sort-of mini tutorial.

I inherited a nice solid wood dining room table and four chairs after my great-grandmother, MeeMaw, passed away. The table now sits in my kitchen with various plants on top of it, but the chairs haven't fared so well with my three active little monkeys who like to climb on everything. One chair was broken beyond repair and went to the burn pile. Two chairs have been knocked over so many times that the rungs are loose and/or broken, much to the surprise of the guests who sit in them. (I guess we ought to try and fix that.) Here's what the chairs looked like before (this is one of the loose-rung ones):

The chair I'm using for this series of posts had the back part broken completely off, and also split down the middle. SuperDad repaired the split, so it was functional as a stool except for some broken wood sticking up out of the place where the rungs used to be. I got out SuperDad's Dremel tool and ground the stick-up parts down past the holes, then filled in the holes and the part where the split was repaired with some wood filler. I let it dry completely, then had to go back and fill in each hole again to repair the fingerprint indentions that some small sneaky person had made. Then I sanded down the wood filler spots with a fine grit sand paper and this is what it looked like:

I figured it could be prettier, so I picked a green paint (FolkArt Fresh Foliage) for the base coat. I realized that even as thick as the paint was, I'd still need a white base coat under that or I'd end up having to use all my green to coat it. I sanded the entire top of the chair to get rid of some of the existing varnish and to give the paint a better, not-so-slick surface to stick to. I then realized that I used all my white paint on the bed board from these previous posts, and all I had was a metallic white. I figured I'd be painting over it, so I gave the chair a double coat of Metallic Pearl (the one step I didn't photograph, so just pretend you see it in your mind), and for that, I used a big 3-inch wide sponge brush (like these). I sanded over the top of each coat after they dried, too, just to smooth things out. Then on went the Fresh Foliage with my OneStroke 1" paintbrush. I didn't like the finished product, but here's what it looked like:

Way too bright green for my tastes, so once I sanded it smooth, I decided to get after it with some light yellow (Sunflower, to be specific). I thought about sponge-painting a light coat of that, but didn't think I liked the way it looked, so instead, I put it on in a big swirly motion with the sponge:

This toned down the green, but then I decided I didn't like the swirlies. So I sanded it again, then sponged on some Vintage White, which I liked a lot better:

Here's a close-up:

I sanded that down once it dried, and since this post is getting photo-heavy, we'll save the rest for later. But here's a sneak peak at what comes next:

Stay tuned!