Today I'm sharing a quick and easy way to update plain wooden chairs using the color blocking technique. I found beechwood chairs for a whopping $2 each during a recent trip to the thrift store. With very little paint, they were transformed into Pretty Aqua Beechwood Color Block Chairs and given a playful Scandinavian half painted look.




Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this makeover I'm so excited to announce a new monthly blog series called the Thrifty Chicks.


On the second Wednesday of every month, a few of my creative junk loving friends and I will be coming together to share a project based on a different theme. This month the theme is chair and our task is to either transform or repurpose a chair.

Pretty Aqua Beechwood Color Blocked Chairs

Color blocking these chairs should have been a very quick makeover, had I not had a few hiccups along the way. Learn from my mistakes should you decide to try this paint technique on some chairs.

More about those hiccups later - this is what the chairs looked like before...


One leg had some damage but I can't complain about a $2 chair. Looks like either a doggie got hungry one day and called the chair lunch or the previous owner sat in these chairs while wearing heels and wore a groove into the wood.


I've included a Materials List towards the bottom of this post. It contains affiliate links for your convenience so you can see what products I used or recommend to complete this project. See my full disclosure policy.

Prepping and repairing the chair

The first task was to give the chair a good scrub with vinegar and water. Then I filled the gouges and sanded only the parts of the chair that I would be painting. In the photo below you can see how I used painter's tape to protect the areas I would not be painting and to create the diagonal pattern on the seat and legs for the color blocking.

Executing my color block paint vision

I painted half of the seat, the top rail, and feet in two coats of the color Pure Ocean, a turquoise blue chalk paint by Dixie Belle Paint Company.  I declared the chair the easiest makeover EVER and walked away proud of my color block finish.

Hated the look

The following morning I walked into the shop with coffee in hand to admire my first attempt at color blocking furniture and hated it.

It looked all wrong.

The dipped legs looked dippy, the back rungs looked naked, and the whole thing looked like a half-baked attempt at painting a chair. In my state of panic, I completely forgot to take a photo.

Onto Plan B

It felt like the chair needed a pop of crisp white but the question was where? Painting the other half of the seat defeated the Scandinavian half painted look I was going for.

After a lot of pondering I decided to paint just the two middle chair spindles white.

I liked it.

I liked it a lot.


But now the bottom half of the chair looked like it needed some white and so I added a band of white over the aqua on each leg.

Hated it.

FAIL

Don't they remind you of a croquet mallet?

Onto Plan C

Go big or go home said the Aqua dipped feet.


I'm much happier with the results - it just needed that pop of fresh crisp white that is so popular in Scandinavian furniture.

As for the Bentwood Stool

This is the second makeover for the IKEA Bentwood Stool. Last year I gave it a Farmhouse Bentwood Stool. After several unsuccessful attempts to sell it at markets, it sat in the basement collecting dust.

Realizing the stool would pair beautifully with the Danish beechwood chairs, I gave it a fresh new aqua and white painted makeover.


The best part about my pretty Aqua Beechwood Color Blocked Chair?

...there are TWO




The lesson in this makeover. You can save yourself a lot of time and headaches by doing a rough sketch of the furniture on a piece of paper first and paint your vision using pencil crayons. It's much easier to change the plan on paper!

So what do you think, has this makeover inspired you to give plain wooden chairs a color-blocked finish? I'd love to hear about it in the comment section below.

If you found the Aqua Beechwood Color Blocked Chairs inspiring, please share it with a friend and /or save it on Pinterest.


You will find this project linked to these fabulous PARTIES.