I know it’s been 3 months since my last post. It’s been a challenging summer……I’ve wanted to post several times, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it all out there. I’ve struggle with life, with finding a new place to live, with trying to do projects, with everything. I feel like I have failed my goals because they are still in process and I don’t know when they’ll get accomplished. I have felt stuck and uninspired and have second guessed a lot of the decisions I’ve made to get me to this point. I have struggled to get out of this funk that keeps hanging around…. I don’t know if I’m really out of this funk, but it was nice to work on a project the last couple of weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, my Granny gifted some furniture to me. She is moving, and as a result she divided up her material possessions. One of the things I wanted was this retro counter step stool. I remember using this thing a lot as a kid. It has a lot of good memories from Cookie Days at Christmas when all the grandchildren would get together to make treats during the holidays. I did some research on this stool to find out about its roots and to see if there were any tutorials on redoing it. I discovered that it’s from the early 1950s. It came in a couple of colors and styles. There are some really cool retro advertisements for these things:

I wasn’t 100% sold on redoing the stool. I wanted to keep it true to the original product, but I didn’t like original color. I hate when people redo old cars with CD players or other features that were not original to the car when it was made. But yellow is DEFINITELY not my color and the vinyl was not in good shape, so I knew it needed to be refurbished.

When I was deciding on a new color for the stool, I thought of the décor in 1950’s diners and other things during that time period. There were lots of vibrant colors (like that terrible yellow vinyl). It should be no surprise that I went with the color teal…..my FAVORITE color.

I picked up some teal vinyl at Joann’s Fabric for $10/yard (with a 50% off coupon). It’s a pretty bold color, but I think it fits the stool. The lady at the Sherwin Williams store made a comment that the color was a cool retro 1950’s color. (She had no idea what I was using it for!)

It was a little tricky to get the right paint color to match the vinyl. I couldn’t use a generic spray paint color; there aren’t enough options for those to match my fabric. I needed a custom color. The Lowe’s paint department said that they couldn’t color match my vinyl because it had a glossy finish. I tried to find a paint chip to match, but there wasn’t an option that was the exact color as the vinyl. I ended up at the Sherwin Williams store. The lady working the counter was super helpful. We looked at a bunch of different options, paint chips and color matching the fabric. In the end we went with the color match read off of the fabric. It turned out perfect. We painted a bit on the fabric before leaving and you couldn’t tell where it was painted and where it wasn’t.

Before I started painting, I disassembled everything and washed it. I taped off the pieces I was going to paint and primed them with Self Etching Primer so that the latex teal paint would stick.

My friends let me use their airless sprayer and to paint the teal color (well, they used their airless sprayer to paint my stool). I was afraid I would mess it up and there would be paint drips everywhere, so I let them paint it. I supervised. It turned out pretty good!

After everything dried overnight, I reassembled all of the pieces. I probably should have let it cure more, but I was a bit impatient to get this project finished and photographed. I love how it turned out! I love the teal and I think it fits with the original time period of the stool.