Ooops....

Sometimes I get these ideas in my head, and I think they are really going to play out well in real life, and sometimes they do. Like my pillow project from yesterday, I woke up this morning and thought how happy I am with those. However, some days like today my projects don't really turn out the way I had envisioned. Like my dining room chairs.

We have had a bad mix of brown and black furniture and accents for a while now, and just recently I decided to focus on the brown and leave minimal black accents, such as small frames, the curtain rod, etc. That means painting my black bookshelves (which I have wanted to do since painting my black console table) and doing something with the our black dining room chairs.

Our chairs aren't your typical dining room chairs, and not anything like my style, but I got them about 5 years ago for $5 from a family friend who sold their coffee shop. They are a black metal typical cafe/restaurant looking chair with black vinyl seats. They are padded and not too uncomfortable, and until now they have worked for what we needed them for...sitting. And I've been able to live with them since we have a nice dining room table we got from a furniture clearance room for a great deal at $99.00.

So I decided that the chairs needed a facelift, and the black wasn't going to work anymore with my transition to brown. I went to Joanns and bought fabric to recover the vinyl with, lucky for me the seats just unscrewed from the metal base, so they were simple to take apart. Using my handy stapler gun I recovered the seats in the matter of 45 minutes or so.

After I finished recovering the seats, it was time to spray paint the metal base. It wasn't nearly as easy as it seemed and I wasn't very happy with the color, so after retouching them with some regular indoor paint, they looked...just ok. My main problem now is that they paint easily scratches off the metal, so they may not be staying a creamy-white for long.

After I got them back inside, the seats placed back on, and back up to the table, I had a sinking feeling that I hated them. They just weren't nearly as charming as I thought they would be, and the paint covered horribly. Sometimes projects just don't turn out the way you had hoped, and this is one example of just that. Here are the before and afters:

Before

After

So what do you think, keep them for a while, or brace for impact and ask Darling Hubby for some new chairs?

Of course Little Lincoln loves them, just because he got to play outside while I spray painted!