I am truly amazed what an afternoon with spray paint can do.  Such bright transformations can be accomplished making something old new again 🙂  Take for instance this REALY old garden bench!

It almost looked like the woods were consuming it as it faded into the landscape.  I think it was a pretty lavender in the prime of it’s last life with a light yellow birdhouse perched above.  I love makeovers so one look at this and I new it had the potential to be dramatic. 🙂  The first challenge would be removing it all without it falling apart!

 

 First we needed to remove a layer of moss.  My assistant and I decided we better use the nylon bristle brush since the wire brush looked like it might just devour this old wood.  I love the old look of the bench so we decided not to replace any of the boards, well, also I just wanted to dive right into the paint and since it is more decorative then providing common seating I decided the old wood boards would fair just fine.

 

Once the bench was cleaned up a bit, my assistant sprayed the bench with a coat of primer made to cover rust since the legs were in pretty bad shape.

To add an element of whimsy and interest, we decided to stripe our bench.  The bench measures 58″ across so I decided seven 8-9 inch stripes would look nice.  Just an FYI, choosing an odd number when using two colors will give you the same color each end of your project.  Using a pencil I marked in 9″ from the left side and then made marks every 8″.  Then I sprayed the every other stripe white.

Once the white paint was completely dry, I covered the white strips with painters tape.

Then I added two coats of turquoise spray paint.

The really fun part is removing the tape to reveal the stripes, however, with this old bench I had to really take my time removing the tape!

Next I had to rescrew the birdhouse to the tall stake and then I added two coats of orange spray paint.

Once I placed the bench in the garden where it would stay for a bit, I placed the birdhouse stake on the back of the left side and tied it in two places while it rested snuggly against the back metal piece.

As you can see, this adds a lot of color to your garden especially when it is in between blooms.  I wish I got this done about 10 days earlier when the bright orange poppies were in bloom!  Actually if you look closely you can see one last lonely poppy to the left of the bench 🙂  Without the bench & bird house and Mackenzie Childs knock off bird feeder,  the garden would be without much color until the next symphony of blooms.