The results

The tangible ingredients
Four chairs: $10, $10, $8, and $5.
Four sheets of sandpaper and a sanding block: $7
One can of primer: Free (was in the basement when I purchased the house)
Four quarts of Behr paint: ~$11 each

The intangible ingredients
15 mins to sand each chair (1h total)
30 mins to prime each chair (2h total)
1.5h to paint each chair 2-3 coats (4.5h)
Approx 1.5h driving around looking for and picking up supplies

Total cost: $87 and 9h of time

The results:

Two new chairs!

I found two more chairs to add to my collection of chairs to refinish for the dining room! They were even more of a steal: $5 for the darker one and $8 for the lighter one.



As you can see, there is a bit of a wrinkle in purchasing used furniture: Cats are not sure what to make of all the smells you are bringing into the house. I think this is mainly upside, but if you brought smells they didn't like it could be a downside. Imagine them marking the chairs (not that my cats do that, but I hear that many some late- or not-fixed tomcats do.)

These chairs fit in pretty well with the ones I bought earlier for $10 each, even though they weren't really supposed to.




And I have some Behr paint swatches to compare, too. I'm a little perplexed by paint, though. Even if it's still cost effective for me to buy a separate quart of paint to use on each chair, it is certainly wasteful to do so. There's no way it's going to take a quart to cover a single chair. What am I going to do with the leftovers? Aren't they hazardous waste?

Which is crunchier: new or repurposed?

I have a dining room for the first time ever, and I don't expect to have one again in the near future. As a result, I am furnishing my dining room on the cheap with pieces I won't mind parting with in two years. Of course, I also want pieces I'll love in the meantime. Such is life.

After much comparison shopping online and in person, I chose the IKEA Dockstra dining table and an IKEA Expedit 4x2 bookcase turned on its side for a buffet.



But as you can see the room is pretty bland right now. That's ok, because that's how I planned it. The color will come from the chairs, which I envision as IKEA competition. Why? Because instead of purchasing new on the cheap, I'm going to repurpose old (on the cheap, too, I hope).

I see this as a competition between IKEA, a responsible furniture manufacturer, and the combined forces of thrift stores, hardware stores, and sweat.

Today thanks to a tip from my neighbors I picked up two dining chairs for $10 each at a local thrift store. Score! Here's a picture.



My plan is to find 2-4 more chairs. There were some good candidates at the thrift store, but they all had plastic covered seats that I wasn't sure how to remove/swap out. The table seats 4 easily but can handle 6 in a pinch. I'm going to strip them down and I think paint each chair a different vibrant color: blue, green, red, orange, purple, etc.

To figure out how to do this I'm going to rely heavily on the clever folks at my local paint store, with some additional information from these links, courtesy of Google:

http://www.ronhazelton.com/howto/antique_chair_restoration.htm
http://www.curbly.com/celee/posts/152-Refinishing-wood-chairs

What prevents this experiment from being maximally crunchy? As I see it the variables are:

• Direct cost of materials, i.e. price
  
• External costs of materials, e.g. toxicity
  
• Cost of labor
  

I wonder if I'm forgetting anything?

The chairs I wanted to get at IKEA were Norvald dining chairs in red, for $69 each. Assuming I got only 4 that would be a total of $276 -- pricey!

I'll pick out paints for now, but I'll update on results later.