Our kitchen table, which is where we eat all our meals since the dining room has wall-to-wall white carpeting, has been a pretty sad sight since we moved in. The drop-leaf table I grew up with (now I get to shout DON'T LEAN ON THE TABLE! just like my mom did!) and Mr. Pants's "youth chair" (that was once Uncle 2's) and a plastic high chair for Shmoogie attached to another family heirloom (in desperate need of recovering) and grey folding chairs for me and Mr. Right. And a second-hand vinyl table cloth we've had for years thrown over the flaking finish on the table top.

I had a plan, though. A plan which can be entirely blamed on the spray painting enthusiasm of the energetic people at Young House Love (and Elizabeth of the comments who recommended them to me). First, I had to wait for acceptable chairs to show up at Goodwill, which didn't actually take very long and being patient instead of buying new I got them for $22 for the pair!
They were pretty ugly (you can see one of them above in its original dark brown/fake speckled state), but I've been following Young House Love for a while and so now I know spray paint in the right color can do amazing things.
But what color? Matching the table, whose legs were painted a curiously lovely shade of blueish sage (?) by my mother at least fifteen years ago, was not going to happen. And probably would have been a little dull, anyway.

Undexpectedly, in the weeks I was waiting for my chairs to appear at the Goodwill, I started to love the random had-it-for-years table cloth. When I finally realized that the "green" leaves on the cloth were a near perfect match for the "blue" table legs, I was sold. The perfect chair color must be in there somewhere.

It totally was! My spray painting skills are atrocious, but for kitchen chairs I think they'll do. I love the color combination (the paint is Valspar's satin "Sumptuous Purple"). It makes me think of an awesome hostel my roommate and I stayed at in Kilmore Quay, Ireland (I'm pretty sure it was Kilturk Hostel, but this was back in 1998 and I can't find any more information than the address and phone listed at that link). It was a sprawling white-washed farm house with the inside full of popping color. Bright purple doors in turquoise frames, hot pink window frames set in royal blue sills, that kind of thing. I'd never seen anything like it and I loved it.

But I don't love spray paint. :( I wasn't happy with the smell, but I could have gotten over that. The environmental and safety hazards wieghed on my conscience, but I was doing a good job of ignoring that. The difficulty of getting a smooth, even finish was frustrating (even though YHL has really good instructions), but more practice would have taken care of that.
No, the real problem is that the strain of holding the can and pushing down on the stupid spray button for half an hour makes knitting painful enough for a day afterwards that I worry I'm injuring myself. And knitting is so much more important than smoothly painted chairs! Or maybe I'll just have to time future spray paint adventures with knitting lulls?