DIY - New Chairs! Neue Stühle!

About 9 months ago, Bryan came home from work with a huge cache of furniture he picked up on the side of the road, also known as Sperrmüle. Several times a year here each neighborhood of the city has a Sperrmüle day where everyone is allowed to toss their old furniture and large household items (old TVs, computers, broken vacuums, etc.) on the side of the road and over the next day or two different official departments will come and pick it up.  Some trucks come through and only take appliances, others only take metal, wood, or plastic, etc.  But, usually the night before the official collectors come there, there is a frenzy of activity in these neighborhoods where thrifty people sort through everything and find treasures to bring back to their homes.  Until each neighborhood's Sperrmüle day, everyone is required to keep their old furniture in their house and it is absolutely not permitted to try to toss this stuff out with the regular garbage.

This one day, Bryan came home with several items - 4 dinner chairs, 2 night stands, and a small dresser.  Since we know eventually we will move out of this apartment and need to furnish our own apartment, we have slowly been collecting things and taking advantage of Sperrmüle whenever we can.  It always seems like Sperrmüle in our neighborhood falls on a super rainy day, and they're nothing worse than going through other people's trash, I mean Sperrmüle, in the rain.

These chairs that Bryan brought home were in good condition structurally, but they were really ugly.  The white paint was all scuffed up and the seat cushions looked like someone has systematically spilled a glass of apple juice on each one.  Realizing that I spend a ridiculous amount of my down time zoning out to other people's DIY blogs, I thought surely I can put some of this knowledge to use and improve on some of this stuff that Bryan brought home.  So, I focused my attention on the chairs.

Here is the before:

They were just really dingy and in need of a refresh.  So gave them a fresh coat of white paint and recovered the seat cushions and voila!  New chairs!

They're not perfect, but it was a good first effort at recovering a seat cushion and using spray paint.  My next project is to give this little bookshelf a new paint job.  Any color suggestions?