"Board"

Chalkboard, that is. Unlike Sherlock, though, I don't go shooting walls.

Love him.

Instead, I decided to try out yet another pin that I had seen on The Pinterest that had caught my eye and immediately clicked with me. It involved turning the door that accesses your garage from your house into a chalkboard. This made sense on a lot of levels:

-The black paint won't show the dirty hand prints that usually adorn a white garage access door.
-The chalkboard material is easy to clean
-It's a great place to leave lists, especially for the budding DIYer

So I grabbed my can of chalkboard paint that was left over from the wedding. You don't HAVE to use pre-mixed paint, but I just happened to have it on hand.

If you don't happen to have any left over from your own bunch of previous DIY projects, you can always use this Martha Stewart recipe to create your own (in any color you wish!):

• Flat-finish latex paint (any color)
• Mixing container
• Unsanded tile grout

Pretty simple, eh? Just mix them together until you get the consistency of semi-thick paint and boom....chalkboard paint.

After I had gathered my paint, paint brush, and painter's tape, I approached my victim canvas.

Yes, our garage is a mess. Also, points for you if you noticed the X-Wing Fighter street sign before I mentioned it...

Nothing special, but it did have traces of the grimy hands that had been opening it over and over for the past (almost) two months.

Gross.

I was sure to tape off the door knob and dead bolt before starting just to make clean up easier. I also taped off the sides of the door so that I could avoid those awkward over-reaching brush strokes. After the first coat, it was obvious this was going to need more that one good slathering of paint, so I let the first coat dry to this result. Note: I used the same door painting technique outlined in my previous post.

A couple more coats, though, and we were looking good. In all, I'd say there were three coats with about 30 minutes in between. The entire project probably took me about an hour and a half.

For better lighting, I opened the outside door. Here, Sam is modeling it's low windows and abundance of squirrel interest.

This is the next day. The door was looking much better with all of the well-dried coats of paint. There was something missing, though.....chalk writing!

I decided to use this tutorial to do some fun chalkboard lettering for the eye-level portion of the door. It didn't turn out too bad (better than it would have been free handed), but I definitely need some practice.

Overall, the project was a fun way to add a little written organization to our garage, but it's also a nice surprise design element that I haven't seen on a lot of garage doors. I really like it! It helps, of course, that the first item on our list makes me think of Peter Gabriel.

Happy Monday!