I Missed My Chalkboard

After a really long time of admiring chalk boards in all their varieties, Hero and I finally decided to put one up in our big house. I loved it! It was mounted to the door to the basement, right in the kitchen. I had visions of clever quotes and neat artwork - And we did some of that. It was lots of fun.

And then we sold the big house about 5 months later.

Rats.

I did not get that chalkboard thing out of my system though. I still admired them and was feeling the itch to get another one up.

Here is the lumber. A thin board and some trim. Pretty simple stuff here.

I broke out my favorite white - Bistro White from Lowe's. I started with a coat on the trim and they were looking good.

I headed outside to spray the board with this way fun chalkboard paint. I did spray a few coats of regular old black paint to cover the board, sort of like a primer. We have about a million half empty cans of regular old black and I was hoping to get rid of one. But no such luck - I did not empty it, so back in the box it went with the rest of them.

Back inside to finish up the trim while the board dried. This went on for a while - back and forth to paint and wait till it was dry enough to paint the next coat.

All that time, Hero patiently waited on me so he count mount it. 

Here it is in all it's glory! The perfect place was on the door to the basement, right in the kitchen. 

Sound familiar?

Hero used little tiny nails (and a nail gun) to hold that baby up there. It is so fun to have a chalkboard again. After I prepped it (by rubbing the side of a piece of chalk over the entire thing and then erasing) I got my first message up there:

Side note - Although the picture does not show in full depth the amount of paint on my feet, you may want to take a tip from me about proper footwear during spray painting. Flip flops will leave a flip flop line if that is what you choose to wear.

But you may like that look.

Also, be prepared for the scungy nail look when spray painting with a dark color. Although Hero has a huge supply of latex/non-latex gloves at my disposal, they are a little too big. When I wore them to spray, the tip of the glove would hang over just enough to collect paint and drip on my board. Ugh.

There are also cool (and very useful) spray can sprayers that you can attach to the top of the can to spray. They make spraying loads easier.

We have one. 

Somewhere. 

But I could not waste time looking for it when I had a chalkboard to paint.

It only took about five days for the grease monkey look to go away.

No problem.