Shutter Wall Chairs for Country Living

Perhaps you've seen my shutter wall in Country Living magazine?  The chairs in the above photograph, (by Bjorn Wallander), are a collection gathered from thrift stores and friends and painted to match.

Country Living Stylist Natalie Warady wanted a mismatched collection of Windsor style chairs to be paired with a white farmhouse table to showcase my shutters.

She sent me this photo of these four amazing chairs.  In my dreams you can find this sort of thing at mom and pop antique shops on the East Coast but not every day here in Reno...

I did however happen to already have one chair that would work perfectly.

This photo was taken with some sort of 2.0 megapixel camera in 2001....sorry.  Originally a set of four from my mom, I had one left that had survived the wrath of Dan's garage purge.  I gotsa admit the other three chairs were awfully rickety and were "taking up valuable space in the garage." We did salvage some pieces and you can see their spindles  in my guest room (tour my home).

I ended up with quite an assortment of chairs in one afternoon.  Not exactly a plethora of variety, so thankfully my good friend Jen loaned me two of her six very cool chairs (as seen on the far right in the photo below).

I ended up with 8 different types of chairs from which to choose.

Not bad.

Next step... paint.

Country Living ordered the paint.

Seacliff Heights

Natalie gave me an idea of which chairs she wanted to use for the shoot, with a couple extra just in case.

Let me remind you this is January.

In Reno.

Thankfully we were having a warm spell so I thought I'd give my sprayer a shot.

The paint was coming off a bit puddled on the chairs, but was so much easier to apply then by brush.

So I sprayed, then brushed, sprayed then brushed.  I actually like this technique as it was pretty quick (even though the sprayer is a b**** to clean).

However...

50 degrees is just too cold, and we were bordering on 49.  I brought the chairs in and they ended up with a crackle appearance and I thought, Hey cool!

Until the crackle got up and walked off the chairs.

Yes.  I swear the paint jumped off the chairs.

So now I had to sand them a bit and THEN brush paint.  Fun times.

Good thing my friend Jen was helping.  Thanks Jen! (what a lovely i-phone pic)

Good music and a space heater.

And five kids running amuck in my house...  Wish I had a picture that showed off our baggy cargo pants.  Were those things really stylish once?

So we got all the chairs painted in like three hours.  Jen did four of her chairs so she would have a matching set when she brought them home.  The paint is actually much lighter in person then it appears in the magazine.  It is a matte finish...which looks nice but would not hold up well with scratches and stains.  In my house, chairs need to be wipeable.

At one point during the shoot, Natalie used some alternative chairs.  They provided more contrast since the blue ones were a lot lighter then she had originally intended.

Just like my tea cart, they didn't make the final cut.

And let me know if you want some of these chairs.  They are in my friend Rachel's garage and I need to post them on craigslist soon before she defriends me on account of harboring her valuable garage real estate. [googlead]