DIY weekend

 Hello, beautiful bloggers.

This past week & weekend I did a whole lot of

sanding, priming, painting, and…sweating.

Matt was out of town all week, so I was bored. And I figured I needed to knock at least one thing off my list. I could have packed, but…well, I didn’t want to.

So, I decided to finish up the bar stools.

Remember this post from last week? beforeafter-1845051

It got me thinking…man, I really need to get that done.

I was just completely ignoring them because it was going to be a lot of work.

Which, of course, it was.

Tuesday night, I brought all of the chairs out into the main area of the basement, threw on a chick flick, and got to sanding.

img_8690copy-4042967

 “Luckily” I had some help from these two:

img_8695copy-1371890

 Lucy was lucky she didn’t get banned from the basement. She kept trying to sit on the chairs when I was sanding them.

Why is it that cats feel it is necessary to sit on any new piece of furniture in our house?

Anyway, once I got those done [which took me allll night on Tuersday], I tapped out and decided to continue on Thursday night.

I wiped all of the dust off them and took them outside to prime them.

I used spray paint for the primer [2 cans per chair]. This time around, I wasn’t so worried about covering the chairs completely with primer. I figured just as long as they were mostly covered, that would be fine. 

One thing I did learn in the process: over spray is a real bitch.

True story.

On the “test chair”, there is a rough type of surface on the seat of the chair which reallllly bothers me [OCD?]. The same thing happened to these, but I had the bright idea to sand down the grit on the seats & wherever else over spray may have caused this annoyance.

Genius. 

After that, I sprayed the “x” in the middle of the back a metallic silver.

The silver spray I got was much more metallic looking than on the test chair. 

It grew on me, though. I liked it better.

So Friday afternoon when M got home, I convinced him to go to the hardware with me to get black paint.

Another lesson learned: it’s worth the extra couple of bucks per paint can to get good advice from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Or has actually painted in their life.

We tell the guy at the counter that I want a solid black for some chairs we’re painting. 

He suggests that we get a more “durable” paint that is used for decking & outdoor use.

I’m liking the sound of durable because I will shed more than  few tears when the first scratch goes on one of these babies.

Anyway, so we got a gallon of black decking paint.

We also got tiny rollers & a good paint brush for edging.

The original plan was to use the paint sprayer Matt had bought to stain the fence with, but he decided that was going to be too much work.

We were going to roll instead.

….we’re not sure whether that was a good idea or not. 

I think they look better having rolled them, but I can’t be sure since I haven’t the slightest how a paint sprayer works.

I sat out there all day yesterday. It was the perfect day for it, thankfully. No wind, high of 75 & sunny. SO gorgeous!

I took a break mid-day to take Dex for a run by the river. Other than that, I was rollin’ these stupid effing chairs. 

We have a love/hate relationship now.

They look pretty amaze-balls, right?

img_8721copy-7652362  Dex was my assistant. img_8727copy-1032297 His duties involved a lot of chewing on his own foot and occasionally getting up to chase one of the cats.

I might have to lower his rate of pay..

 
 I still have some edging to finish, but by the time 4:30 rolled around, I was covered in sweat, I had used over half a roll of toilet paper to blow my nose throughout the day [yay for allergies] so my nose was SO sore, and I had black paint all over my body.

I had some on my stomach.

I have no idea how that even happened.

So I took another detox bath & called it a day.

Needless to say, I slept like a rock last night. It was a fun-filled week/weekend in which I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep for a combination of reasons [matt being gone, up at the ass-crack of dawn for yoga, etc], but it was super productive, so I had that going for me.

Alright, kids, I’ve got to get some work done.

Hope you all had a great weekend too.

I also hope that it wasn’t as productive as mine.

I’m exhausted.

Here’s to surviving Monday-

signature2520copy-5120597