A couple of months ago, I bought quite a few chairs and stools from a local guy I’d found on eBay.  The three stools weren’t top of my list of furniture we needed, but he was selling them anyway and we had a space for stools in the kitchen, so I made him an offer for the three lots together.  They’re supposed to be placeholder stools, but I still wanted to put some effort into making them fit the environment.

They’re quite light, not fantastic quality, wooden stools.  They came to me with a pale varnished wood top and the legs had been painted a yellowed cream colour, which didn’t go with our kitchen at all.  The tops aren’t centred very well on the leg structure, but those bad boys are screwed on tight, so I gave up trying to remove them and just worked with what’s already there.

Barry surprised me with my very own mouse sander (and it’s not even my birthday), which I put to work by sanding the tops down to remove the pale, yellowy varnish, and removing any rough patches on the legs.

As I knew I was going to use chalk paint, I didn’t do any more than that, as I’ve found it’ll stick to pretty much anything (after putting loads of effort into sanding one of the chairs I did the other week, and it made no difference compared to the other two!).

The first photo of the three is after sanding all of them down and applying the first coat of dark oak wood stain on the right hand stool.  The next one is after two coats to all three stools.  It was still nowhere near as dark as I’d anticipated, so I ended up giving them three fairly thick coats of stain to achieve the colour I wanted (the one that was on the tin!).

Then I painted over the cream legs with my old faithful Annie Sloan Original White Chalk Paint, the same one as I used for the chairs.  These only took one coat (the chairs took two or three in places), because I was painting over a light colour, rather than straight onto bare wood.  These were an incredibly fast upcycle compared to the chairs of a million spindles.

Finally, I used Rust-Oleum Clear Furniture Wax to buff the legs up, and applied an extra coat where people’s feet rest in the hopes it protects them a bit.

Here’s the end result!  I’m happy with these, because I think they’ll last us a lot longer now before we need to get any more for the kitchen.