Rocker Refresh

Sorry for my extended absence...my hubby just graduated with his PhD (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and we've had family in town. SO very proud of him! He's amazing! :)

Our poor front porch has been sorely neglected since we bought our house a year ago. We threw our wooden rockers on one side and that was all the lovin' the porch received until this month when "front porch" popped up next on our prioritized to-do list.

Let me back up for a minute, though... As a housewarming present for our first house, Hubby's parents surprised us with a pair of wooden rocking chairs. Our front porch had wooden flooring, so the wood tones in the rockers looked great out there. Unfortunately, the front porch got full sun until late afternoon time, so the rockers baked under the harsh light for the three years we owned that house. By the time we moved, nearly all of the varnish had worn off and they were looking a bit rough. :(

Here's our rockers on our new front porch looking pretty tired and worn out. Mad props to Hubby for taking these before pictures of the rockers! He knew I'd want a before shot, so took several for me to choose from before attacking the chairs with his sander. He's a keeper! :)

Our new front porch has concrete flooring, so we decided to go with white furniture instead of wood tones this time. We love our rockers, so instead of buying new ones (can you say cha-ching?) we decided to give them new life with a fresh coat of white paint.

Blurry phone pic, but I wanted you to see just how THIN each coat went on! 

Jeremy sanded the chairs down with his sander, then they were ready to paint. I had recently read that using a foam brush as opposed to a traditional paint brush would yield smother results, so we decided to give it a try. I'm happy to report that the foam brush strokes were way smoother, but was much less happy about how extremely thin each coat went on. Guess how many coats of paint it took? 1 coat primer + 3 coats of paint + 1 coat polyurethane--and they really could have used a fourth coat of paint. I was too tired for that. Now let me translate that into days... We could only do one side of the chair at a time, then wait for that coat to dry and flip it to do the underside. So for every coat of paint, it took us 2 days. That's 10 days of painting, people. We usually only work on projects late at night or on the weekends, so it took us a month to finish these bad boys. I was thinking it was going to be a short and simple weekend project. Let's all laugh at me now. ;)

Anywho, after much doubt that they would ever turn out looking ok, they're done and I'm loving the white!

Check out the cute little chair we bought for our little man! So sweet!

Next up, I'll show you what we did with the other side of the porch!