painting

MONDAY 5TH JAN

I worked from 8:00am – 12:00pm. I’ve been feeling really tired since Christmas and have had niggling cold symptoms that have not amounted to much but have been quite annoying (runny/blocked nose, sore throat, aches), and I think that is what has been making me feel tired. Once I got in from work, I headed to bed and slept from 1:30pm to 3:00pm. I still wasn’t feeling great, so I had a bath once I’d woken up, which helped a little bit. Once Shane came home from work, we made a roast dinner with a Quorn Roast, roast potatoes, roast parsnips and carrots, broccoli and gravy.

TUESDAY 6TH JAN

I had the day off from work and planned to do some blog work. Shane left for work around 8:30am, and I played Animal Crossing for a bit while watching Below Deck. I then started working on some blog ideas and set up a blog calendar for 2026. I’m still feeling a bit tired, so I had a nap from 1:45pm – 4:25pm. We had decided earlier in the week, as part of our meal plan, to have shepherd’s pie for tea, so I started to make that once I was awake. We had that for tea with peas and an espresso martini afterwards.

WEDNESDAY 7TH JAN

We woke up at 7:45am and had coffee before Shane headed off to work for the day. I played Animal Crossing before getting ready for work. Snow has been forecast between 12:00pm today and 12:00pm tomorrow, so work was manic with people panic-buying everything both in the shop and through our online services. I was shattered when I got home from work, so Shane and I had fish and chips for tea from the local takeaway.

THURSDAY 8TH JAN

We woke up around 7:10 am and had coffee and cigarettes. There hadn’t been any snow, but it had been really cold in the night, and everything was frosty when we woke up, so Shane scraped the ice off his car and headed off for the day around 8:00am. We needed some things for decorating the dining area, so I placed an order with B&Q, including wallpaper, paint, brackets and a wallpaper hanging kit. I spent some more time on my blog calendar and did some laundry and other housework before heading to work for a 5:00pm to 10:00pm shift. Because snow was still forecast, people were still panic-buying, and the shop had been stripped bare of essentials by 7:00pm!

FRIDAY 9TH JAN

We got up at 6:40am and got ready for our work days. I worked an 8:00am – 2:00pm shift. I am still feeling ill and tired, so we had a nap when I got in from work for a couple of hours. The brackets that I had ordered from B&Q arrived, and I had a notification that the paint I had ordered for the kitchen was ready for collection, so we headed to B&Q to collect that. When we got home, Shane filled some holes, and we prepped the kitchen by washing the walls down with sugar soap, ready for tomorrow. We then sat and did some bullet journaling before heading to bed.

SATURDAY 10TH JAN

We were both off from work today, so we had a lie-in and didn’t get up until 11:20am! After a lazy morning, I booked myself in for a dreadlock maintenance and detox session with Threadloxx. The wallpaper I’d ordered was delivered from I Love Wallpaper, so I can start that tomorrow. We painted the kitchen, and Shane put up the brackets that had come yesterday. We did some more bullet journaling and watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire in the evening.

SUNDAY 11TH JAN

We got up at a more respectable time of 9:45am today, though I still feel a bit tired and ill. Some more of my B&Q order was due to arrive between 10am and 12pm, so we didn’t want to miss that by lazing around in bed! The items got delivered at 11:00am, so Shane did another coat of paint on the kitchen walls while I painted the skirting boards and trunking in the dining area. Once the paint was dry, Shane helped me to hang the wallpaper on the back wall in the dining area. We had salmon fillets, new potatoes, mixed veg and parsley sauce for tea and watched some Taskmaster before heading to bed.

In last weeks post I told you guys about my dining chair find and the idea I had for upcycling them, todays post is about prepping them and painting them.

I decided that I was going to paint the chairs in different colours and change the seat fabric to white instead of going with white chairs and coloured seats. I wanted to match the colours of the chairs to storage boxes in my dining area – pink, blue, yellow and white, however, I thought that having one fully white chair may look a bit odd but I was not really sure what colour paint to choose instead. I decided to head to B&Q and see what sort of colours they had and what stood out to me. I chose B&Q Colours range and bought tester pots in Playful Pink, Buttercup Yellow, Tropez blue, and lastly, instead of white I chose Green Apple.

Before painting I needed to prep the chairs by removing the varnish from them so that the paint would adhere properly. Unfortunately I learned this the hard way as all I did for the first chair I painted was to “rough up” the varnish rather than remove it completely, the paint didn’t take very well and still, in certain lights looks patchy now. I decided to remove the seat to make the process of sanding a bit easier and managed to remove the seat from the chair frame fairly easily, all I needed to do was flip the chairs upside down and undo 5 screws then lift the seat off. Once the seat was off I was able to start sanding the chair frame down. I used an 80 grit sandpaper and sanded each chair back to the wood in the garden. Sanding is a lot messier than I anticipated and after being covered with dust and having to wash so many clothes I figured it would be better to wear my overalls for the job! I worked on one chair at a time so that the screws and seats didnt become muddled as I wasnt sure if all the screw holes would match up on each chair.

There are a few things I learned about sanding while undertaking this part of the project (aside from wearing overalls…) and one of them is to sweep up immediately after you have finished otherwise the fuzzy “helper” will go and lie in the dust you have created and get covered! The other thing I learned was that sanding is a lot more time-consuming than you imagine! I had expected to clear the varnish from one chair in around an hour… in reality it took more like 4 hours to remove all the varnish per chair.

Once the sanding was finished I was able to start painting. I started with the yellow first as I was going to be using the same brush for all chairs and washing it out between colours. Starting with the lightest colour first means that there is less likelihood of paint to be ruined through colour contamination should the brush not be cleaned thoroughly.

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Aside from the yellow chair needing several layers of paint and still being patchy now (due to the varnish not being stripped completely) I’m pretty happy with how the chair frames turned out and the paint colours I had chosen. The paint is a matt finish and I used 3 tester pots per chair, did 2 to 3 coats per chair (the yellow chair took 5 pots and a lot more coats of paint) and they were fully dry by the following morning, touch dry within 20 minutes.

Next week I will be sharing the upholstering part of this project!