Chalkboard Wall

I know this isn’t a new invention, in fact we’ve had one in our little store for years, but we just took the plunge and made one in our house and we love it!

This wall was screaming for something exciting. We couldn’t let it down. Simon did a lot of the prep work. Mama taped just to be on the safe side, but Simon did the bulk of the work.

We used a level to draw a straight line across the wall. I decided an entire chalkboard wall (ceiling to floor) was a bit too much so we just divided the wall in half (approximately).

We were careful to cover the floor as best as we could with a couple of old sheets, I’m not sure if it was smart or not so smart to have my kids help me paint a wall BLACK but we made it through and we are still all in one piece.

After the boys went to bed I put a second coat on the wall. In case you are interested in the brand we used, and some other possible locations for a chalkboard I took these (hopefully) helpful photos.

You have to let your wall dry for THREE DAYS; my kids were about to freak the hell out about this. It was a long long long 3 days. After the board dries you have to ‘condition’ the wall by coloring the entire thing with a piece of chalk on its side. It takes forever – depending on the size of your chalkboard of course. After the prep, whenever you wipe your wall clean you have to re’condition’ the entire thing. So, I’m afraid we won’t be wiping our wall clean anytime soon, maybe never.

The wall was about 1/2 way conditioned in these photos, and this process left us a mess of chalk dust, so Gus was taking care of business.

Once the wall was done we decided we needed a place to store our chalk and some sort of  a divider so the wall above the chalkboard wall didn’t turn into a chalkboard wall without chalkboard paint.

I found a small trim piece at our local hardware store that was almost the exact size I needed, we shaved a little off one of the ends, and voila!

Oh and I’m pretty sure that piece of trim was only $3.88. And the chalkboard paint was right around $12, and the chalk we already had in our possession.

We found these cute little buckets at Target in the dollar section, that I generally avoid at all costs.

Score, score and score – a chalkboard wall complete with all we need to entertain us on rainy days (that are available in spades around here lately) for under $20.