Chalkboard on a Budget: A Tutorial . . .

It was this picture on Miss Mustard Seed’s blog that started my obsession with having a gilded chalkboard in the house.  I already had some of the elements to pull it together.  Here’s what I did to finish the job:

First, I hit the home depot for quart of chalkboard paint. They had some premixed in black or green.  I went with black because I knew that after conditioning it, it would be a nice worn grey color.

 

I also picked up a thin sheet of MDF.  It cost me a whoppping $5 and they were willing to cut it to size for me. I used a small foam roller for ‘extremely smooth surfaces’ to roll the paint onto the MDF and let it dry before doing one more coat.

Next I headed over to The Queen’s house to use her framer’s gun to permanently affix the MDF to an empty frame I happened to already have in the house.

The framer’s gun is a cool little tool that shoot’s sharp glazier’s points into the wood of the frame to secure your artwork or in my case, pressed wood.

With the MDF in place, I had myself a chalkboard! Now all I had to do was attach some picture hanging wire, condition the board by going over the whole thing with the side of a piece of chalk and then erasing it, and find the right place to hang it in the house.

Here’s my new chalkboard prominently hung in our family room for all to see.  We’re using it to post a scripture we’re going to memorize each week and for special congratulations and mentions.  I’m also using the bottom portion to list my kids jobs for the day so they don’t have to ask me a million times and I don’t have to use up thousands of sticky notes. Such a rewarding project for this momma!

For reference, the actual size of the chalkboard is 3 feet by 4 feet.