Hello Blue Chair! Hello White Bench!

Have you ever painted furniture that you already loved the colour of?  Crazy isn't it, but the furniture was needed and the colours just weren't right, so I painted them.

In July I bought blue cushions for our family room to coordinate with the light green sofa and wall colour (you can read more about it here)?  The banker's chair that sits across from the sofa was black. While I loved the look of the chair in black, I really felt that the black was too heavy and a dark blue would work better in the room. 

It took me two tries to get the right blue. The first coat was too bright and just didn't get along with the slightly different shades of blue in the cushions and the rug. I took my can of paint back to the store and had them make the paint as close to BM Old Navy as possible and now I love it.

We also found that we needed a coffee table - somewhere to put our drinks and the magazines and the laptop and our feet. I moved the bench from the front porch (which you can see here) into the family room to see how it looked. I liked that it had such a low profile since the sofa - ahem - does not. The only trouble was the bench was painted in a turquoisey blue, which looked great on the front porch, but didn't go well with the blues in the cushions and rug. I realized the bench was the best solution for our feet and drinks so I decided to paint it a creamy white.

Initially I used the same white paint that I had used on the upper kitchen cabinets, but for some reason it seemed very stark white on the bench. Most of the whites in the cushions and the rug are cream or light beige so the white just made them all look dirty ... and that wasn't the look we were after. So I mixed six spoonfuls of a light beige paint I had into some of the white paint and ended up with a softer cream colour that was just right.

It felt funny to paint furniture that I already liked and then end up with both pieces being slightly the wrong colour. Fortunately both were fixable and now make me happy. Do you often take a couple of tries at getting the right colour when you paint?

Linked to Weekend Bloggy Reading at Serenity Now,
Sunday Showcase Party at Stephanie Lynn