Third Time’s a Charm

As promised in yesterday’s post about painting my chic-meets-glam dressing room, we are back to reveal my vanity chair transformation.  I’m loving the way it turned out, but this was one of those projects where we had to try it again, and again, until we were happy with it.  That’s okay though; we’ve learned that our end product doesn’t always turn out the way we envisioned it would the first time around.  So we just give it another whirl until we like what we see!

This is what the chair looked like when we snagged it from Home Goods, which by the way is a store that you need to check out if you have never been.  Next time I go in, I swear I’m going to take a picture because one half of the store decor is color coded and it looks way cool! And as you found out here, I LOVE color coding! Anyway, back to the chair:

John originally wanted to do a two-toned look, with some of the chair staying its natural color and some being painted white.  I wasn’t so sure that would look good with the all white vanity, but what the heck! We can always paint the whole thing white if we don’t like it.  So John took off the horseshoe shaped pieces between the legs and the two pieces that created the “X” on the back.  Here it is with the horseshoe pieces removed:

The reason for removing them was because they weren’t going to get painted and we knew it would be a lot easier to take them off, rather than try to paint around them.  And here it is with the seat taped off because that wasn’t going to get painted either:

And here she is after a coat of Kilz Oil-based Interior Primer and Glidden’s off-the-shelf white in gloss finish.  Hmm, not liking so much.  (sorry about the clutter! But hey, after all it is where I get ready everyday so what do you expect?!)

Ooops..the gloss is too shiny and it needs to be one color.  So on to Plan B.  Here we introduce a product we love: Krylon Dual Paint and Primer in One spray paint in flat.  The vanity is very old and definitely doesn’t have any shine and we chose white because the vanity it white, or so we thought!!

Now here’s the twice-painted chair with the vanity:

 Grrr the white is still too bright! Please excuse my little mess I’ve got going on there   We finally got it right the third time around with Krylon spray paint in Ivory.

We even took it a step further to create the shabby chic look that my vanity has going on.  We simply used our 220-grit sandpaper around the corners and edges to reveal the natural wood that the chair once was, like this:

And now we’re loving the pair together!  Ahh, much better.

Sometimes all it takes is a little trial and error.  And because spray paint is so inexpensive, we don’t feel too bad about having to fork out a few extra beans to make this chair look the way we really want!

Have you guys had to re-do a project that didn’t turn out right the first time?? This certaintly isn’t our first, and I know it won’t be our last!