An easy tutorial for how to paint exterior wood furniture. With a paint sprayer and the correct exterior paint, you can have a finish that will last for years! I love partnering with HomeRight for these projects to show how easy these projects are with the paint sprayer!
These outdoor benches need refinished in the worst way, but they are one of my least favorite designs to paint!
The slats are seriously the worst to try to get in between with a paint brush. And even if you’re able to get your brush in there, you nearly always have a ridiculous amount of drips.
Plus, when you pull your paintbrush out from in between the slats, it’s super hard to not mess up the finish on top of the slats. I mean, seriously… can you tell how much I despise painting furniture with slats like this?!
But I picked these benches up at a yardsale for only a few bucks and I knew they would be perfect for our outdoor fire pit area that we’ve been working on this past spring.
The benches are nice and solid, but the finish was really wearing off. I felt like I already had enough of the stained wood look going on with the deck itself, so I wanted to paint these to give the area some contrast.
My absolute favorite outdoor paint to use is this Olympic One that has an all-climate protection package. It is fade and peel resistant even if you leave the benches out in the sun and rain.
I used the same paint on the bench we built for our deck 2 years ago and it has held up perfectly! We have left it out for 2 winters now, and there is no sign of peeling paint or anything else. It also gets tons of use with lots of kids climbing all over it and any kind of dirt marks wipe up right away.
It almost has a shellac-like finish that makes it seem like a rock-hard finish. I seriously love it!
So with my paint purchased, and my anxiety over painting slats in full effect, I turned to my trusty HomeRight paint sprayer.
The older I get, the more I value my time and want things done efficiently. I remember being young and just taking my time prepping and hand-painting furniture without a care in the world.
Now, I want the same professional finish, but I want it done as well as possible, in the least amount of time as possible.
That’s the beauty of the paint sprayer. It lets me get into all those slats without any issue at all. And the best part, it takes about 5 minutes total per bench! You can check out the HomeRight site for even more great projects that were completed using the paint sprayer!
Because these are going to be outside for their entire life, I did give them a second coat. Just make sure your first coat is completely dry and then apply your 2nd coat using the paint sprayer.
I wanted to give it a little touch of color, because I’m me and can’t leave anything just white.
I had some leftover green paint from my front door at our last house. I used a small brush and then brushed the paint off onto a paper towel so that I was mostly working with a dry brush.
Then I just dry brushed it onto the legs starting at the bottom and brushing upwards. As I got about halfway up to the point I wanted to stop, I started lifting the brush away and applying less pressure.
I love the random effect this brush effect gives, but you could also tape it off and give it more of a straight edge look! Anything to add a little color!
Plus, this leftover green paint matches perfectly with some exterior throw pillows I purchased last year. Apparently it’s hard for me to break from my favorite color scheme!
My favorite part, though, is how quick of a project this is thanks to the paint sprayer. I had these prepped, painted and was cleaning up all within 30 minutes!
Not bad to go from this…
to this…
