Chalkboard project

After finishing my picture wall, I had a few ideas of what to do with the large frame I took down.

I have been wanting some sort of chalkboard in our kitchen area for awhile. I was thinking of something like this:

Source: pureandnoble.blogspot.com via Melissa on Pinterest                                                                                                                                       

I knew that I was not that brave, and plus I think our walls are too textured. I think that once we finish the basement, and have a little play nook, I will chalk board paint one wall, but this wall just is not right for it.

So instead I decided to use my large frame as a chalk board.
Here is what I started out with.

After removing the glass, and reusing the inner frame for my Jamberry Nail Shields set up, I spray painted the outer frame teal. (I am slooowly adding some teal accents to our decor. Going for a black, white, deep red, teal, hodge podge, and it may take years!)

After painting the frame, I needed something to go inside to use as the chalkboard. At first I really wanted to do a magnetic chalkboard. But the guy at home depot talked me out of it, because I did not want to try to use sheet metal, and magnetic paint is expensive. Next thought was ply wood, but I did not want to cut it, and I did not want to go back and forth to home depot with my crew. (Plus I am a little intimidated of that place!)

 So plan C, was to use the chip board like backing that was orignailly in the frame. It was super smooth, so no sanding. Perfect size, so not cutting. Lightweight, so minimal holes in my wall when hanging.
I used a can of chalkboard spray paint, and painted my chip board. I used an entire can, and it still did not look too great. I was determned to make it work, so after chalk priming it, I thought it would be fine.

Next step was to glue it to the frame. For some insane reason, I thought gorilla glue was a good idea for this. I had never used gorialla glue before, but thought, what the hey. After basicly glueing everything to everything, and getting glue on my hands, I seriously regretted cheating on my hot glue, with this ridiculous stuff! Always know how to properly remove gorilla glue from hands before starting your project. It was a disaster  and my hands took days to recover. Bryson woke up mid glue disaster and had to be tended to by his 3 year old brother. My biggest craft fail yet, and everything almost went into the trash. Of course, the chalkboard now looked horrible with glue all over it. But I put it up anyway.

Then my final mistake was using the chalk markers on my board. For some reason, they do not come off! So I took it back down and repainted it with this stuff.

After drying, it looked much better. 

It is thicker, and made it look so much better. Now we are using real chalk, and it is coming off nicely. This project was way too difficult, but in the end, it turned out pretty great.

Our family is enjoying the chalkboard, and now we have more room for artwork on our fridge. most important lesson learned, never using gorilla glue again!