Painting Dining Chairs with My Critter Spray Gun

My first One Room Challenge is now over and I’ve taken the last few weeks to relax for a bit. At the same time I also feel like I have a little bit of house project momentum going. So while I’m in the mood to get things done I thought it would be fun to tackle our dining area next.

I’ve been wanting to redo this part of the house for awhile but just never got around to it. The only progress we really made in this space was installing a new light fixture. Which we still love by the way…

For about two years I had up some blue curtains. And we held onto our mid-century dining set that we used in our last place before buying this house. I love this mid-century set but my style has been evolving and I think it’s time to try something different this time around.

My goals with this dining space are to:

1. Install some different window treatments (longer, more neutral curtains and bamboo shades).
2. Get a new table
3. Get some new chairs

I did end up selling the mid-century chairs you see in the last picture. Having upholstered chairs and a toddler just doesn’t mix. There’s really no way to keep the upholstery clean. So I’ve been on a hunt for some different chairs for awhile.

I eventually found these spindle chairs on Facebook Marketplace a few weeks ago. By the way, is anyone else having a lot more luck on Marketplace too? I feel like I’m not finding as many things on Craigslist anymore.

The guy I bought these from said they were originally from Ethan Allen. If that’s true I think I got a great deal! They are solid and really sturdy chairs. But they were super beat up and needed some help.

So I sanded out the really deep scratches as best I could and cleaned them down really well. And then I decided to use the left over milk paint from my master bedroom nightstand project to paint these chairs black. The specific paint I used was General Finishes Milk Paint in Lamp Black.

I’ve painted chairs by hand (with a brush) in the past and it was probably my worst painting experience ever. Chairs are so, so difficult to paint! Especially when they have all these tiny little grooves and spindles. So I decided to use my new Critter spray gun on these guys (same spray gun I used on my nightstand project). The Critter has been such a fun little tool for me. It makes the whole painting process a lot more enjoyable.

For those interested in how this particular spray gun works I thought I would give a quick run down.

Here’s what the spray gun looks like. It uses a mason jar to hold the paint which is actually really nice because when you’re finished painting you can put a lid on top and store the unused paint in the same mason jar.

So far I’ve only used two types of paint with this gun: General Finishes Milk Paint and Sherwin Williams Pro Classic. The milk paint needed to be diluted with some water. I went by the instructions on the General Finishes paint can for diluting. But I have used the Pro Classic paint without diluting and it seemed to work just fine. But next time I spray with Pro Classic I may try diluting it a bit with Floetrol to experiment and see how that goes.

Once you have your paint ready you screw it onto the gun and connect everything to an air compressor. I then set the regulator to 90 PSI. So far 90 PSI has seemed to work well for me but different paints also have their own recommendations on the cans for what pressure you should use.

Once you have everything set-up you can start spraying.

So far I’m pretty happy with how these chairs turned out. They’ll eventually need another coat and then I’ll seal them. I’m thinking about using hemp oil and wax to finish them because I’ve heard good things about that process. Once I have some time to do that I’ll update you guys again!

But so far I’m really enjoying the look of these chairs in the room. Just need to find a new table and get those bamboo shades hung in the coming weeks. It’s funny how little changes can add up and make such a difference.

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Dining Room, DIY, Home