October Fab Furniture Flippin Contest: Spray It Pretty Lace Chair

Here are my Top 4 Excuses for never trying a paint sprayer before.

1. It’s too hard to learn how to use.
2. It won’t really save that much time.
3. It will make a big mess.
4. It will be a total pain to clean up.

Guess what? I was totally WRONG!!

When I had the opportunity to participate in the October Fab Furniture Flippin’ Contest sponsored by Home Right, I realized just how silly—and completely false—all of those old excuses were. I had a lot of fun creating my project to go along with this month’s theme Spray It Pretty and I learned a really useful new skill.

Home Right manufactures lots of handy DIY products, including sprayers, heat guns and various other painting tools.

PLEASE NOTE: Home Right sent me a free Finish Max Fine Finish HVLP Sprayer to complete my contest entry.

Thank you Home Right!

All opinions are my own.

I decided to spray this little yellow chair that has been sitting in my garage forever. I took about a half hour to read all of the directions, familiarize myself with the sprayer and practice shooting water through it to see the different spray streams. That was easy.

So much for Excuse #1 that it would be hard to learn how to use.

I used a chalk/mineral based paint and sprayed the entire chair a pretty blue color. It took 10 minutes.

10 MINUTES!! That is awesome. Painting a chair like this by hand—with all of the rungs—would take me much longer than 10 minutes for sure.

Excuse #2 that a paint sprayer won’t really save that much time? That’s. Just. Not. True.

It sprayed beautifully too and left a really nice finish on my chair. (It looks splotchy in this photo because the paint is still wet. It leveled out as it dried to a professional-looking finish.) I always start on the bottom of a chair and I did have a few drips on my first couple of passes with the sprayer. I just smoothed them out with a paintbrush and kept going. I adjusted my distance from the chair and refined my spraying technique per the instructions. By the time I finished the top of the chair, I had no drips—not even on the rungs—just a perfect finish—with NO MESS.

Here’s a shot of the drop cloth. You can see there is very little overspray. And I totally forgot to move my car before I started spraying. No problem.

Excuse #3 that a paint sprayer will make a big mess is debunked!

Now came the part I was dreading … the clean-up. It wasn’t that big of a deal. I would compare taking the sprayer apart and cleaning it to taking your blender apart and cleaning it after making smoothies. It’s easy to do once you know how all of the parts fit back together. Yeah, it takes a little longer than just rinsing out a paintbrush, but I certainly cannot say it was “a total pain to clean up.”

Excuse #4 just went down the drain.

My little blue chair was pretty now … but I wasn’t done yet. I wanted to create a pattern on the chair using the sprayer. This would give me a second opportunity to use the sprayer and a test to see if I remembered what I learned the first time. (I did!) It would also let me really “spray it pretty” for the contest.

I covered the seat of the chair and the rungs with a vintage lace curtain and sprayed away. It took less than 5 minutes and completely transformed the ordinary little chair. In the future, I will remember to tape off the areas of the chair closest to the curtain because there was a bit of overspray I needed to touch up with a brush.

I finished the project by adding a wood applique that says Love to the top rung. I basecoated the applique in the blue color before drybrushing white over it.

Here’s my finished chair. I love the texture on the seat from spraying over the lace. Paint really does make everything pretty, doesn’t it?

~ Courtney

All Things New Again is a family-owned furniture and paint boutique located in Leesburg, Virginia about an hour or so west of Washington, D.C. We offer our own eclectic brand of hand painted furniture, paint for your next DIY project and home decor.