before & after: my $1 stool

One of the many reason I love summer is because of the fact that I can go outside and SPRAY PAINT! Hot dang I love to spray paint! When I picked this stool up for $1 at a yard sale last summer I knew it needed a major overhaul. The seat was ripped and the frame had seen a better day. It was just so... blah looking.

For a year, it's been living in our basement (I had good intentions of finishing it). Last week, I picked up a few cans of spray paint, recovered the seat with a piece of fabric from my stash and now I have a bright & cheery new stool. I love it's yellow & white-ness :) It's so much better than what it used to be.

... a few tips about spray painting almost anything ...
1) Make sure your object is nice & clean. Get rid of any dust, dirt, grease or gunk. This will help the paint stick better. 2) I usually skip the "priming" step and buy a spray paint that has primer built in. Make sure it is meant for the material that you are painting (in my case: metal). 3) Do 3-4 very light, even coats of paint instead of 1-2 thick gloppy ones. This will prevent runs and will give your piece a nice durable finish. 4) Don't be afraid! In this case, all I had to loose was the $1 that I spent on this stool. What's the worst that can happen? Happy spray painting! What have you spray painted lately? [p.s. this post may be linked to any number of these blogs]

[SIDE NOTE:  To recover the seat, I removed the ripped vinyl/leather to find a thick piece of foam & a wood disc (which the base had been screwed in to). I added another thin layer of foam (for added "cush") and pulled & stapled my fabric around the cushion to the bottom of the wood disc. This is a similar process as you'd do to recover a dining chair. It didn't maintain its exact shape (since it was almost a boxy circle... If that makes any sense), but the added foam made it a lot softer and more comfortable. It was really just a trial & error process since I had never recovered anything like this before.]