Thrifty Thursday: Repainted Chair

For as long as I'm able, I'm going to try to do a "Thrifty Thursday" series! If you've been keeping up with my blog, you'll know that I'm really into shopping at thrift stores as well as the benefits that they provide my local community. The reason that I say "for as long as I'm able" is because eventually I will go back to school and I'm not sure how many local thrift stores we have! I will have to do a little bit of research! 


Hopefully I can convince some of you to try out thrift shopping, share some ideas or tips for thrift shopping, or just give more insight as to what benefits they have for the giver and the receiver! 


So, this week I purchased an old-ish wooden chair from The Good Shepherd Alliance for $5! Why did I want to buy a chair? Well, my sister recently got a new apartment and took mine with her. I wasn't going to the store to look for the chair but came across it and saw potential!

It looks pretty good from far away but unclose it had a few..."flaws." You can tell that it has had its fair share of time in somebody's home! Not overall a bad quality, but I just wanted to make it "mine."

I decided to take it on as a project and paint it so that it would match the furniture and decor in my bedroom! Although I did make a few mistakes (it was my first time ever trying to paint a piece of furniture), I'm pretty happy with the outcome! 

I have done a little bit of research on how to paint furniture (thanks to all of you bloggers out there) and came to what seemed like a logical "game plan."

The first thing that I did was paint the entire chair with Zinsser Primer. That's right. I didn't sand. The oil based Zinnser grips like glue and dries in two hours, so I was able to apply two coats in just one day! I made the mistake, however, of not adding any kind of additive (such as penetrol) to slow the drying process, which created a few brush strokes. Now I know for the future. Then I did a quick sanding (nothing too strenuous) to remove any drips and brush strokes.

Since I'm not very "paint-savy" just yet, I decided to spray paint the chair with a general furniture paint with a satin finish. I spray painted the entire chair white, painted it up, and the spray painted the base a light green.

So I bought and repainted this for a total of $25! Not too shabby, right? I'm pretty proud of it and it looks great in my bedroom!

Do you want to share a thrift store find on my blog? Type it up and send it to bentleyandme@gmail.com! I'd love to share it!

Also, leave a comment and let me know what you think! Do you have any advice for future projects like this?