Painting garden furniture to give it a new lease of life

You don’t have to spend lots of money to have something ‘new’. Simply painting garden furniture that’s seen better days can give it a new lease of life, cost you less, and help the environment to boot.

We’ve had a dark green bistro set for around 15-20 years (it lived under the pergola at our old house). I wanted a small table and chairs set to sit on our new stone circle in the garden, but the ones I looked at weren’t cheap. So I decided to paint the old set, and I have to say it’s made a MASSIVE difference.

(I’ve included some affiliate links in this post, shown with an asterisk (*). If you click on them and make a purchase, I get a bit of money in my back pocket, to help towards future creations to share with you on my blog.)

So here are the table and chairs before hand.

Pretty grim huh (so is the garden 😳 )?

I cleaned the furniture with washing up liquid and water, then hosed it off.

There were some areas where the paint was flaking off, so I scraped any loose paint with a scraper.

I decided on a cheerful turquoise colour to brighten up the furniture. I used *Hammerite (Sheer Aqua) metal paint as the bistro set is metal (obviously) and also to try to eradicate any rust forming on the exposed areas. This is available in a range of colours.

I applied 2 coats in order to cover the dark green colour, leaving a day between coats.

Tip – Buy cheap paint brushes when using metal paint and throw them away after use, as you need a specialist cleaner for Hammerite that can cost more than the brushes.

I added some *cushions I bought from eBay (you can also get these in a range of colours) and put some flowers on and around the bistro set to style it up.

As you can see the garden has also improved somewhat too 🙂 You can see our full garden makeover of this area here and see my creations in other parts of my garden here and here.

I made a DIY solar chandelier to match. I will be doing a blog post on this next year (sign up to my newsletter to ensure you don’t miss it!).

This simple paint job gave my garden furniture a new lease of life, and saved me a few hundred quid at the same time. The table and chairs now pop in the garden, as opposed to sitting sulkily in the background like they did before. It shows what a difference painting old garden furniture can make, and hopefully, I can enjoy my bistro set for another 15 years!