Apparently, You Can't Spray Paint Furniture: The Story of My Bookshelf

Before 

So, today my friend and I decided to paint a book shelf that we're planning to use in our apartment. Naturally, we decided to paint it pink, because whoever said orange is the new pink was seriously disturbed. Well, long story short, fifty five dollars, five hours, and two pink knees later, we found out that you can't paint furniture with spray paint.

While I understand that this would be totally obvious to most people, clearly, it's not obvious to me. Everyone was like, 'you have to use real paint and primer and rollers and little brushes to paint a book shelf or it will EXPLODE' (I may be exaggerating a little bit), and I was like 'but that sounds so expensive and complicated...I'm just going to use spray paint'. In my defense, my roommate and I did go to Lowes and ask the lady at the paint counter what we should use to paint the bookshelf, and she was all like 'well, if it's not very big, you could probably use spray paint'. Of course, we were like 'okay! Let's be on our merry way'.

Well, the lady at the paint counter was WRONG! We went home with our two cans of spray paint and cheerfully started to paint the shelf. Well, we got about half way through and ran out of paint (not before we managed to accidentally paint a spider hot pink. Apparently, when you get spray paint on a spider, it curls up into a hot pink ball and dies. Who knew?). No problem, we went back to Lowes and bought two more cans of spray paint. It was not until we had totally exhausted all four cans of spray paint did we realize that we were 1) covered in pink spray paint (I had hot pink knees all day) and 2) that our bookshelf looked like hot pink, splotchy crap. In my defense, I did once paint a rattan chair with spray paint and it turned out beautifully. That chair now sits in the corner of my bedroom under a pile of laundry that I'm too lazy to put away. It's a great story. However, it seems that there is a difference between something like, say, a bookshelf and a rattan chair. Apparently, painting furniture with spray paint is a bad idea. So that was a spider that died in vain.

Anyway, after much deliberation, we went back to Lowes and went up to the paint counter and were like 'so we tried to paint this book shelf with spray paint and it didn't work'. And the guy at the paint counter just looked at us like we said that we had tried to paint a chair with nail polish (which, incidentally, does work) and was like 'of course not'. So, after blowing $20 on spray paint, we bought primer and paint brushes and paint and went started to paint the book shelf again.

Let me tell you, it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Of course, we didn't wait for the spray paint that was already on the bookshelf to dry before we started to prime, so our primer turned a sort of pale pink color. I figured that that was okay, because the book shelf was going to be pink anyway. I also discovered that, if you kneel on a painting canvas covered in pink spray paint, your knees turn pink again. Let me tell you, it takes a lot of soap to get spray paint off your skin and, as it turns out, I still have two, faintly pink knuckles. We also found another paint covered spider during the priming process, so that's two innocent spiders dead in the name of book shelf. I believe that that's known as manslaughter.

Fortunately, we did use our college-educated brains for a few minutes and figure out that it would probably be a bad idea to put the top coat of paint on the shelf before the primer was dry, so we finished up the painting the next day. I am now in possession of a pink bookshelf that cost almost $55 and 2 spiders to paint (the actual shelf was free), not to mention that I had to buy gas because I drove back and forth to Lowes so many times!

Do you know what you can buy with $55? A new book shelf. The two spiders were gratis.

Just sayin'