Spray Paint vs. Paint Sprayer

 Remember when I got this for Christmas??

Well, I finally got up the nerve to use it this weekend! And, let me tell you, I have been living in the darkness. This paint sprayer is AMAZING. 

What you're seeing are two separate chairs. Same style, but different painting methods. Chair "A" was painted with Rustoleum Spray Paint. It took two cans, two coats and LOTS of detail painting with a craft brush. Chair "B" is the sprayer experiment victim. It took me less than a minute to do the whole chair. No lie. There's some detail painting that needed to be done around the top and legs, but I think I'll take   > 1 minute over the hours of stinky spraying, and waiting for it to dry, only to re-coat with spray paint.

Time to paint 1 chair, including detail touch-up: 

Spray Paint: 5-6 hours

Paint Sprayer: Less than 1 hour  

PROs: 

• Sprays very even coat of paint in very little time
• Easy cleanup (of latex paint) with water
• Can spray any color of paint you want. You can even mix custom colors and no thinning required of latex or oil based paint 
• Latex paint is much higher quality, and gives the furniture a smooth, buttery finish, even if you over sanded ( like I did) 

CONs: 

• VERY messy. You'll need a lot of ventilation and a lot of tarp, not only for spraying but for cleanup. You can see my makeshift paint booth in back of chair "B".  M-E-S-S-Y. 
• Some practice required to prevent drips 
• Uses a LOT of paint. Since most of it ends up, not only on the thing you are painting, but on the surrounding areas too.  

This works well if you are:

• Going to be using latex paint and/or want to have control over your colors. You can use oil-based, but who wants to deal with this kind of cleanup with mineral spirits? Not me. 
• Have projects with lots of sides/angles
• Have a large space in which to spray
• Are time-sensitive and have lots of items to paint 

My final thoughts- being able to control colors and save time definitely beat out the messy operation and cleanup. I spent about twice as long cleaning up as I did actually spraying. Now, given that spraying a chair took less than a minute, I think that's not too bad, especially if you've got more than one thing you need to paint.  

xo,