I am a believer in practicality. When old outdoor furniture was left on my front porch by the seller, I didn’t just want to get rid of it without seeing what I could do with it. The paint was faded lime green. I am not a green person so I looked at it every time I walked past it for over a month trying to decide what to do with it.
I knew I didn’t like this green. I wasn’t sure which direction to go with the new color, so I raided my spray paint cabinet. We tend to collect things from past projects because I can’t bare to just throw something away if i think I can use it later on and save myself a few dollars. Hence spray paint collection. I did light prep on the chairs with 80 grit to smooth down the bubbles and drops that were in the old green paint. It was chalky and smoothed out pretty easily. Then I grabbed a can of silver spray paint and went to work.
I started spraying with silver and I could tell pretty quickly that I would hate it. It was like Barbie puked all over this chair. Now I love a good sparkle, but this was too much for me. Plus all that glitter showed every little flaw in the chair. So I let it dry and went back to consulting my spray paint cabinet. I found a deep purple gloss that my middle son had insisted I get for a space project at school. He called it galaxy purple. It was the next fullest can that I had, and I figured it couldn’t be worse than Barbie silver so I gave it a shot.
I sprayed up the second chair and I have to admit it was a little bright for me at first, but the gloss was much more the effect that I was looking for over the metallic sparkle paint. Next, I got to work taping up the table. It is a unique piece and its the reason I started tinkering with this project in the first place. The center is tile and configured in a petal shape. I have never seen anything like it and I wanted to play with it and see what I could do. That table in green just didn’t do it justice.
I used painters tape to cover the tile because i wanted to try and preserve as much of the white grout as I could. It had been spotted when the table was painted green years ago. A scrubbing sponge got a lot of it off. This tile top with the new purple color, i thought, looked really attractive. Wow!
I love how deep the purple turned after it dried. It even impressed my husband, who is not easily impressed by my whim projects. I knew I could go buy any color of spray paint I wanted, but purple is my favorite color so I wanted to give it a try. To give you an idea of how I use color, I use mostly neutral tones with pops of color. I add throw pillows or frame a fun water color my kids did at school. This purple furniture is not my norm but my son was my inspiration and told me from the beginning I needed to paint it purple. Let me tell you, it is absolutely worth going outside your comfort zone because the result was worth it.
Usually I am a planner so whim projects are harder for me to successfully complete. I feel like I got lucky in this case. The lesson I learned from this project was to take a risk. You never know how it could turn out and you could end up with a really nice focal piece. My favorite thing about this project is that, walking up to my house, this is the first thing you see. That just makes me smile. Good luck!