Painting Wicker Patio Furniture

Before I get started with the post today, I just wanted to send a shout out to Betty, Mindy and Amy. I was working at my booth on Wednesday rearranging furniture and painting a few things in the back when they recognized the bench we’d recently made from dining room chairs and stopped to talk. They shared they have been vacationing as a family on Amelia Island for decades. Is that cool or what! It’s always so much fun to get to meet you guys in person and it totally made my day to visit with such sweet ladies. If you girls are reading this, I hope your vacation was amazing and you have a safe trip back home to Georgia!

You guys may remember I originally bought this wicker settee for my booth. At the time, I left it unpainted so customers could customize the color based on the needs of their own porches. It sat for a bit without much interest so I brought it back home in order to make room for bench made from dining room chairs.

Once I got it home I came SO close to painting all of my porch furniture black. SO close. The thing about painting wicker furniture is as soon as you paint it, it can’t really be undone. It’s not like a piece of wood furniture where you can paint it, sand the color off when/if you change your mind and start over again. It took a few days but in the end, I finally decided to keep everything consistent and paint the settee white.   My reasoning was this…the front door is black, the porch lights are black and the shutters are black…painting all of the patio furniture black may have just been too much…black.

I have friends that have painted wicker furniture with milk paint and have had great success. Some of the girls at The Pickers Market use oil based paint on wicker furniture while others choose spray paint. There are a lot of different paint mediums you can use on wicker so make sure you do your research and choose the best paint for your furniture type, climate and porch needs.

I chose exterior paint because the rest of the wicker pieces on the porch are painted with exterior paint. Over the past few years, they’ve needed a fresh coat of paint and some have cracked but for the most part they’ve held up well given the coastal winds, heavy rains and consistently high summer temperatures.

I thinned out the paint just a bit and used a 2-inch brush to work the paint into the wicker fibers. Be aware that thinning out the paint like this will cause overspray. You need to make sure you use a drop cloth in order to protect your surfaces from overspray and paint drips. On the flipside, if the paint is too thick it will glob in the wicker.

This is after one coat of paint…

This is after two.

I’m really excited about the way the wicker settee came together. I know I’ve said this before but breaking the porch up into zones really helped things to feel more functional. Painting all of the wicker the same color helped the porch feel more cohesive.

It’s definitely a space we’ll be enjoying throughout the seasons!

I hope you guys all have a safe and happy weekend. We have a great week coming up next week. I’ll share a table I recently painted on Monday! Until then, I’ll see you on Facebook, Pinterest and on Instagram over the weekend.

Many blessings,

CoCo