Antique- Aqua Refinished Chairs

A couple weekends ago I spent my entire Saturday devoted to refinishing two chairs I picked up from Goodwill for $6! Hours later, I not only had two beautiful {like new} chairs, I also was covered in sweat, had a sunburned back and my hands and legs were covered in a variety of different color paint! I'd say a Saturday well spent :)

Here are the supplies

-Kilz Primer in a spray can

-Rust-oleum Satin Aqua spray paint

Small sponge brush

-Sanding block {not pictured}

-Behr Faux Glaze

-Behr black sample paint

Here are the chairs before in all their wooden glory!

After two coats of primer

First coat of aqua paint

Final coat of paint. Ready for a good sanding!

There is a picture of my sanding block, you can use whatever grit you prefer, but I'd recommend a high grit sanding block. I had two dull already been used like 100 times sanding blocks, and after all the sanding I felt as if I had arthritis in my hands for days.

There is no rhyme or reason for sanding. Just let your aggressions out :) I sanded all around the edges and made big sanding marks on the legs and back. The more you sand, the more rustic and aged I think it makes it look. So I sanded, A LOT!

Up close of the sanded areas, before the glaze was applied

I used a Tupperware I didn't mind tossing, to mix the faux glaze and the black paint. You truly need very VERY little of this. I had a ton of what's shown above left over. You just pour some glaze in and keep adding the black paint till you get your desired look.

You paint it on with your sponge brush, and wipe off with a rag {or in my case ripped up, old, nasty, discolored shirts from my husbands drawer!} You can use as little or as much of the black glaze as you wish. It's really nice because if you put too much, you can just wipe it away!

This is what you're left with after you wipe away the black glaze

Here is one chair finished

One finished chair and one the chair I struggled to complete. I kept thinking if I just wait another 5 minutes my husband will get home {from his 5 hour fishing trip} and help me sand the second chair. No such luck. He pulled up just as I was finishing the second chair and picking up my mess. Maybe next time

I couldn't wait to bring them in the house. I wasn't quite sure where they were going to reside, but after a couple different spots they found their resting spot.

Landed here, under our picture shelf. Next to my grandmothers side table that my brother refinished when he was here last. Other than the little odds and ins I've found along the way, this was my first venture refinishing furniture of size. And since I just bought a huge antique buffet for our dining room, it definitely will not be my last! Promise to post about that when we finish! Hope everyone enjoys their week, I know me and hubby are looking forward to F-R-I-D-A-Y! Tootles for now :)

Easter/Birthday Celebration!

We had a wonderful weekend celebrating Todd's Dad's Birthday and our Risen Savior!! Saturday night we had the family over for a lovely dinner. I recently unpacked our wedding china and was super excited to use it for the first time!
Made the kids these cute little goldfish looking carrots!

Got some beautiful tulips for the centerpiece on the table :)

The other table

Chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing and key lime tart cupcakes for the Birthday boy!

About to blow out his birthday candles. All those sweet boys in their blue shirts!

Gillean's :)

My gorgeous nephew, Braxton and my SUPER gorgeous hubby!

The whole gang hanging around

Todd & I are truly blessed to have such an amazing family. We were so grateful to spend the weekend with some of our awesome family and missed the others we weren't able to be with this Easter. We are blessed. Our Savior is great!

PB Inspiration

The new PB catalog is filled with awesome DIY inspiration! I actually saw a fellow blogger make a centerpiece very similar. If you're not familiar with 'The DIY Showoff ' you must check her out! Her blog is filled with such awesome DIY projects. Anyways, this project is super easy and so very reasonable. I had everything on hand except for the floral and paper mache' eggs, which I got at Michael's for 60% off. I think I ended up paying less than 20$ for all the branches below.

Here is how the centerpiece will look when Easter is over and the Easter Eggs are no longer hanging from it! I got his vase from my Aunt Nancy, which I think at one time was my Nonnie's {Grandmother}. You can see the years of ware and tear had taken it's toll on the appearance of this vase, so it was definitely in need of a paint job. I used Rust-O-Leum's Heirloom White {MY FAV} to give this baby a good, back-to-life look.

Initially, I was going to also spray paint them with the Heirloom White but decided to use this aqua spray paint instead. I had extra bottles of it on hand from another project I was working on {blog post to come shortly}! Spray painted the eggs on one side, after they dried rotated them and spray painted the other side.

Wrote Happy Easter on the eggs

I then cut lots of jute and hot glued them to the eggs so they could hang from the branches

Final Product!

Biggest Undertaking

Still trying to catch up on all the back blogging of the house renovations! Ripping up the carpet and installing hardwood floors was the largest task we took on and it was definitely the most rewarding! It took us about two months of working every Saturday and Sunday for about 10 hours a day to complete this endeavor. My husband is talented, SUPER talented!

This was our living room before, in all its carpet glory! Also, before the house was painted. Pretty much this is how it looked when we closed on the house, before anything was done.

Babe cutting all the carpet and getting ready to roll it out! Bub had already painted the walls, and we're making progress!!!

All the carpet is gone!

This was my job to rip up all the glue/carpet remnants!

So, initially when we bought the house I wanted Todd to rip up all the tile in the house and then we'd replace with the wood floors. I just don't like the look of rooms divided by different flooring. The foyer tile and the kitchen tile had to go! Todd broke-up about a row of the tile before deciding that he needed some more tools from Lowes. . .

Todd returned from Lowes about 3 1/2 hours later and this is what he was greeted with! An exhausted wife, who took out all her aggressions with a hammer and some gloves! Needless to say we didn't need the 'tools' babe HAD to go get at Lowes! He was very proud of me. I was sore for about two weeks, it was even hard for me to write and type at work. And there was NO way we were ripping up ALL the tile in the kitchen! After completing the foyer I swore I would never bust up tile again in my life! The clay dust is still falling in our house and this was done over 3 months ago! It was a messy job! :)

After doing about half of the house, Todd discovered that taping the floors together with paint tape would help keep them together better.

We had lots of helpers! Seriously, without Todd's dad being there almost every weekend that we worked on floors I think it might have taken an extra 2 months! So special thank you to Todd's parents, Aunt Boo & Uncle Bob, our cousin Brady & my parents! You guys rock!

Our master room First piece of floor going down! AHHHHHH :)

TG & BC working on the floors in the office! This was the first room we started in so at this point we were only about 10 rows in. If we had only known . . .

The process went something like - MEASUREMARK

CUT

TROWEL OUT GLUE

BANG FLOOR IN. . .

Repeat ninety million times!

Todd laying the last piece of floor! You can't see his face but he was as happy as a 5 year-old Christmas morning! Finally, after what seemed like an endless project we had reached the END!

The finished project was worth everything! Todd and I would just lay on the bare floors and make pretend snow angels! That's how excited we were to have our floors completed!

In this side view you can see the hand scraped textured of the floors. They are BEAUTIFUL! They look black, but truly they are just a dark brown. They're distressed and hand scraped and exactly what I had envisioned when set out on this mission.