spray paint

if you have a big, fat front porch with a view of a mountain, you have to have some good sitting chairs so you can be taken seriously. i don’t mean those canvas chairs you can buy at target with the drink holders (we take them camping) and i don’t mean the teak chaise lounge (although who wouldn’t slap one on a porch, if one just strolled by) you can get at those crazy stores online that show porches outfitted with real indoor furniture and curtains. i mean serious metal outdoor chairs. preferrably from the forties or fifties, just to drive home how serious you are about the whole sitting on the porch thing.

if you live in most places, you go to a yard sale and pick up a few old chairs, sand them down and repaint them. the whole process takes an afternoon and costs maybe fifty bucks. but if you live in brooklyn, that sort of furniture doesn’t even exist. so you look around upstate. what you find are the chairs you want, but they’re at “barn sales”, which is a gentle way of saying, “antique store”, which is, as you know, code for “i found this on the side of the road and scuffed it up and am going to charge you a thousand dollars for it”. but if you want the chairs (and we really, really wanted them), you fork over whatever the barn people ask because your only other option is to sit on the floor.

so we bought three. two regulars and a rocker. i might not have mentioned it but if you knit and are cultivating an old lady scene and you don’t have a rocker, you might as well give up now. so the rocker was a necessity. it is a disaster. when it came home the back was rust. not rusty or rusted. rust. like when you’re walking out in the middle of nowhere and you come upon some shard of civilization from a hundred years ago. there’s nothing there but rust. the steel fled maybe twenty years ago. but i can rock like a madwoman in it and i think the fact that it lists to the side like a torpedoed ship just adds to the charm.

one of the non-rockers was already painted a sassy flat red. not quite like the red primer most boys i went to high school with painted their cars, but close enough. the paint is relatively even and i think the color is funny, so that one stays. not so the others. the sweetie and i each grabbed a chair, some sand paper and a good supply of iced tea. i got out my stupid filter mask (you know, the white masks that fit over your nose that some construction workers wear when they’re doing things that cause tiny fibers to float around). i know who i am and i know how my lungs feel about me. mask. the sweetie spent about three minutes maskless and suddenly my idea seemed brilliant. the sanding took way less time than i expected. his turned into a spectacular combination of cherry red with a soothing pistachio green underneath. like a reverse olive with pimento. mine turned from orange rust to yellow rust. what if i sand right through to somewhere else? i asked him. what if i end up in another country? it’s not likely, he reassured, but he looked over at my chair and i could see he was ready to grab me if i started to disappear into some sort of rust wormhole. the yellow rust and orange rust together actually looked quite beautiful and if we’d paid less for the chairs, i might have left mine in its unruly state. but i need to be able to rock in that thing well into my actual old lady years, so forget it.

bring on the spray paint. now, last time i used spray paint, i think it was probably on some old metal chairs sitting in my parents’ yard right now. that would be at least twenty years, maybe more. i have poor spray control. the sweetie went over it with me several times. don’t try to cover everything in the first pass. it will drip. just spray evenly and we’ll do several coats. the fact that i needed help getting the cap off didn’t bode well for the rest of the experience. i shook the can, checked the nozzle and began to spray. i was surprised how similar the paint was to the yellow rust. then i was surprised how sticky my left hand felt. and how yellow, when i looked at it. any dreams i still harbored of being a graffiti queen died right then. evidently the spray paint folks and i have different ideas about how to signal where a spray nozzle is.

the pattern (yes, i said pattern. i know) of the chairs is, i think, called pie crust. look at the photos and you’ll see why. this particular pattern seems to encourage duotone painting. the main part of the chair one color and the details another. the sweetie suggested this but i have no idea how anyone could get spray paint to follow the sort of rules you’d need for that sort of detail work. besides, i chose my colors carefully and want them solid. we looked for the paint from a local hardware store and i was immediately drawn to a honey colored can cap. caterpillar yellow it said. funny, i thought, i don’t know any yellow caterpillars. still, what a color. and i wanted green for the other chair. in my mind i was searching for the color we eventually unearthed on both chairs as their original- a pistachio color that just screamed “old lady business going on here!” but the spray paint industry caters to a community more interested in putting four foot letters on abandoned buildings than the subtleties of greens for porch chairs, so i was about to give up. then i found it. not pistachio, but something better. international green. again with the funny names. but perfect. bold. a good companion to my caterpillar yellow. wait a minute. caterpillar yellow. international green. i hadn’t even looked at the photo on the can. it is some sassy green farm implement with yellow trim. ace hardware makes its own line of machine and implement spray paint. caterpillar. international harvester. i really am from the midwest.

photos of the finished product will be posted as soon as the spray paint dries.