Hasta La Ideas

Chalkboard paint is magical. I bought a gallon for the kids last Christmas. You should have seen their little eyes light up when they unwrapped it.

“Um, dad?”

“Yeah.”

“This is house paint.”

“Yep.”

“So…”

“We’re going to paint some walls with it.”

“…”

Today, they love it. We covered one wall in my son’s room and another outside his room. They draw pictures on it, leave notes, play games, and more. I mean, it’s permission to write on the wall. What kid wouldn’t love that?

My wife and I soon discovered that it’s good for more than entertainment. I framed an 8″x11″ rectangle I painted in the kitchen to make a quick-and-easy family communication area. After that I started to poke around the Internet to find even more ideas. The following are a few of the best ones I encountered:

1. Label jars. Yes, a lot of people are using chalkboard paint for labels. And why not? It makes for a durable, re-usable identifier. I love these food canisters at Babble. Those are quite inexpensive and a bit of paint lets you easily find what you’re after.
2. Identify spices. This one is just brilliant. It seems that, no matter how you store your spices, it’s never easy to find the jar you’re after. This clever person painted each lid with chalkboard paint and then wrote the name of each jar’s contents. I love it.
3. Chore Chart. Maybe I’ll consider this for Camp Caolo 2014. The folks at Sweet Pickins have posted a full how-to for the great, door-length chore chart that they made and topped off with, you guessed it, chalkboard paint.
4. DIY Clock. This is a nifty idea from Home Made Simple. A piece of plywood, a simple clock mechanism and some chalkboard paint make for an adorable addition to a child’s bedroom wall.
5. Martha Stewart goes all out, of course, with this wall-sized, multi-tone calendar. It takes some effort (and a large wall) but the result is infinitely great looking and infinitely re-usable. No unitasker here!
6. These chalkboard wine glasses are cute, too. No more drinking someone else’s merlot.
7. Chalkboard “placemats” offer irresistible permission to write on the table for the little ones, as well as built-in place cards for larger family events.

Finally, here’s a great tip. You’ll be tempted to write on your new surface as soon as it’s dry, but hold off. It’s possible for your initial scribbles to get “burned” into the paint. That is to say, leave a faint shadow of itself even after repeated erasing. To prevent that, HGTV explains, coat the fresh surface – all of it – with a thin layer of chalk. Erase that, and you’re good to go!

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