Toddler High Chair

There are lots of things people don’t tell you before having kids.  Probably because you will never have kids if you know these things.  One of which is that you will spend the first year constantly trying to clean a high chair that will never actually be clean again.  It’s one of those impossible things, like fitting into your pre-pregnancy jeans.  

So after four years of living with our highchair I was so happy when my youngest was finally old enough to sit in a booster chair.  But that quickly became a sticky mess too. 

I thought maybe he was old enough to just use our chairs, but his little head barely made it over the table.  This would not work.

So I had my eye on the Ikea Ingulf Junior chair but with the closest Ikea 3 hours away, and the price being $49 per chair.  I knew there must be a better option out there.

I spent a couple of weeks scouring Craig’s list and came upon this super cute wooden high chair for $5!  It was missing the bottom foot rest but for $5 I could live with that my boys could live with that.  I immediately emailed the seller and after two weeks of emailing back and forth (sometimes I really hate Craig’s list) that chair was finally mine.  

I had my heart set on painting it yellow.  But in the spray paint aisle of the hardware store my 3 year old somehow convinced me it should be red.  

In the end he was totally right and I LOVE the red (spray paint “Red” by Valspar).  I also borrowed my friends Cricut machine and cut out the letters ‘sit’.  I think I  say ‘sit down’ about a thousand times during any given meal in our house.  So I thought this was appropriate.

I was thrilled with my little chair for about 3 seconds.  That’s when the fighting over it began.  What was I thinking! Of course with 2 kids I would need 2 chairs.  So the hunt for chair number 2 began.  The next weekend I headed down to the Raleigh State Fairgrounds flea market.  I found one for $15.  I thought that was a fair price, but wanted to see if I could get it for a little less.  I asked the seller if she would do $10 and she immediately said yes  Whew that was easy!  Saved $5 which was enough to cover the cost of the spray paint.  For this one I got my way and painted it a cheery yellow (gloss “Gold Abundance” by Valspar).  LOVE it!

Once dried I sprayed it with Minwax Polycrylic Clear Gloss Protective Finish.  I will be wiping these down A LOT so they certainly needed some sort of protection.

And now no more fighting, at least not over chairs!

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