In which hard work pays off

My wall is finished! I would have posted pictures earlier... but as it turns our you aren't actually supposed to use this product for a full 3 days. This took me about 2 weeks to do - mostly I did it on the weekends. This was my first kitchen project and I am in love with it! What used to be a boring white wall with nothing on it is now... a magnetic chalkboard! Here is a look at the process it had to go through:

First I had to scrape the orangepeel texture off of the wall that was there, then I lightly sanded it and put a thin layer of mud to make it nice and smooth, then lightly sanded that. This was a very messy dusty process, this here is the result: drywall and mud! Hooray! No - seriously - this was the most time consuming thing I had to do.

Step 2 was to prime it, which means I was back to boring white wall again - only flat this time! Technically step 3 is also a primer, but if you first do a regular primer then step 3 will be a lot easier and you won't waste as much paint.

Step 3: magnetic paint! This was kind of cool to work with, and with each coat we did we would test the magnetic strength. We did about a zillion coats because we wanted it to be a really strong hold. I knew that my end result was going to be a chalkboard but at this point I hadn't yet decided 100% what color it was going to be... I was considering a dark color but I was afraid it would be too strong in such a small room. But magnetic paint, as it turns out, is black. After finishing this wall I figured if the room could handle black then probably we were going to be ok with a dark color! Although it's weird how the black just sucks in all the light in that part of the kitchen....

Lastly and finally: my chalkboard! It took several coats of the chalkboard paint to fully cover the black that was the magnetic primer, but I'm really happy with the end result! This room needed something and this was it!

As soon as I mentioned that the wall was ready for use, family wasted no time testing it out! Most of the top stuff is my sister Sandie, the drawings and tic tac toe around the bottom are mostly her son Elliott (ha, I so won at tic tac toe) and then those lovely orange scribbles are my son Matthew's. When I showed him how to use the chalk his eyes lit up and he started laughing as he marked up the wall. This was so worth it, and clearly it's a hit! Click on the picture to see a closeup of the wall.

This was my first playing around wth the chalkboard. Aaron and I spent time doodling pictures and erasing things, and this was the result.

Happy Almost-Halloween!