Another take on a rocking chair

Now I had 3 of the rocking chairs like the one I posted about yesterday. One for each of my children. They have obviously all outgrown them, being 8, 7 and almost 4. They were all fairly similar, but a little different too. I posted all 3 of them on our local online classified and allowed customers to order them any color and style they wanted and with any personalization. They went in about 5 minutes for way more than I could have sold them for if I had tried to sell them as they were. So today, may seem a little redundant from yesterday, but since these are 3 of the projects I did last week I am going to show you another rocking chair transformation.

The second chair was ordered by a woman that asked me if I could paint it bright red and distress it, she did not want any personalization. Distressing is actually fairly simple, but there are a few ways to do it. I hope that over the course of this blog I will cover them all. For this chair, however, I did a multi-layer paint treatment with two contrasting paint colors.

Here was the before picture:

Now it was already a pretty bright red, and quite distressed, but unfortunately there was no way to remove Gavin's name which she did not want without ruining the existing paint...plus it deserved to have some new life anyway.

1) Step one was to paint the entire chair black...black is a great contrasting color to red and will later have amazing results when distressing.

It only takes one coat and it does not have to be a good coat...sloppy paint jobs have the best distressing effects!

2) Paint the new red over top unevenly, heavier in some spots than others.

3) At least 2 coats will probably be necessary, but make sure they are light coats so that the contrasting color will still seep through....again some places it will be heavier than others...

4) Sand down areas that would wear with age...the seat, the arms, the rockers, etc.

This is the first time I have attempted this technique with red...I usually use white as the top coat, which comes out AMAZING against the contrasting black.

Lets review our expenses on this project:

Black paint - already purchased
Red paint - $5.00 for 1/2 gallon (plenty left over for future projects)
Sand Paper - $2.14 (only used 1 sheet)

So for about $3.00 we transformed this old child's rocking chair into a decorative piece for her Americana home.

Chairs like this would retail for $60+. This one retails at the rockingchaircompany.com for $99.99.