Put Down The Paint Brush and Nobody Gets Hurt

OK folks, I might as well say this right up front:  This is not going to be one of those warm and fuzzy posts. It's not intended to make you think,  make you cry, or make you laugh.  On the jibber- jabber scale, it doesn't even rise to the level of a yakabout.

This is what might be called a blog irk. I'm only writing it because I'm hot and irritated and probably a little hormonal, and it seemed like a healthy alternative to heading to Baskin Robbins.

Do you know what I've been doing for the past week? 

I have been on the hunt for some vintage dining room chairs.

Actually, I've been on this hunt for about two years now, ever since I refinished the rest of the furniture in my dining room. I've been looking in earnest for the past week because I  earnestly want to buy them.

As in, now.

You see, all year, we squirrel away cash to use on our anniversary. We keep it in this little coffee can we call The Untouchable.

 (We learned to do that the hard way, through too many years of famine.)

Since this was our 29th anniversary, and the traditional gift for that year is furniture, we decided to do something different. We decided to add our Untouchables to the "chair fund" that I've also been squirreling away and  buy those dining room chairs.

Woooohoooooo, right?

Yeah, well, it wasn't that easy.

We spent the night in Savannah and got up raring to go on Monday morning.  We hit every conceivable store in the city, and then we headed home, stopping at vintage stores and malls along the way.

Did we find vintage dining room chairs?

Well, yes, we found them.  The problem was that every set of chairs in the style we liked had already been subdivided and painted into colorful pieces of occasional whimsy.

Oh sure, there were still some complete sets out there.  Had we been looking for sky blue chalk paint with chevron print cushions, we could have found it.  Fuddy Duddies that we are, we weren't looking for that. We were looking for simple red mahogany chairs...the kind that stand the test of time.

Those, we could not find, and that's why I'm irked this morning.

In fact, I'm just a little irked at the whole overdose of painted furniture out there in general.  Yes, I realize this is not going to be a popular opinion in blogville, but it's my opinion nonetheless.

Not long ago, the painted pieces would catch my eye in the vintage booths. They stood out as different and creative. Now, it's a chalk painted jungle out there. Honestly, in all my years of trend watching and fad following, I have never seen anything go gangbusters like the current painted furniture craze. 

That's what it is, after all, a craze.  It erupted way too quickly to be anything else. When something consumes the market the way painted furniture has, what you have is neither a style nor a trend.
It. is. a. craze. 

That's not to say that I dislike it. I don't. I actually like the look of it.  I admire the artisans and bloggers who have made paint techniques so popular. I have some pieces I'm planning to paint here at my own home. 

It's nothing new, after all. We had a lot of painted furniture in my home growing up.

I realize there are many twenty- somethings out there who do not know this, but your grandmothers already did the paint technique thing. They did it back in the '70s, during the last recession; They called it antiquing... a little paint followed by swipes of darker glazing.

Raise your hand if you remember...

I have no problem with that. In fact, had it not been for the antiquing fad of the '70s, I would never have learned to refinish furniture in the '80s. (Something tells me I'm going to be very busy about ten years from now, too...)

My problem isn't with the painting. It's with the gobbling.  Because they are willing to paint just about anything, just about everything is getting painted.

Faster than you can blink. .

 And folks, not everything ought to be painted. Not everything increases in value with a coat of paint. In fact, sometimes just the opposite is true.  I wish Generation Paint would slow down for a pair of minutes. I wish they would leave a few untouchables in their original glory.

 Save the whimsy for that mid-century modern blonde veneer. Turn that dark '70s pine into something colorful and cottagey. Do whatever you want to '80s oak... I have plenty to sell you if you want it.  But please... please... could you leave the Chippendale alone?

And that, as unpopular as it is, is all I have to say about that.