I did it!

I painted giant black rectangle on my kitchen wall, and framed it with trim I bought at Lowe's and painted a dark gray.

Despite how the picture looks, the rectangle is not crooked. There are plenty of other (minor, I hope) flaws in the wall, but that is not one of them.

Here is a close-up of the frame:

And here you see the new chalkboard posing with my great-grandma's chopping bowl. We don't use it as a chopping bowl anymore. It's more of a mail/rubber band collector that I try to keep empty but it never seems to stay that way.

This is what I learned from this weekend's chalkboard adventure:

1) If you don't have painter's tape, electrical tape may not be the best substitute. It's pretty stretchy, and is not easy to get straight.

2) Cutting a 45-degree angle is really hard!

3) Cutting edges to be the same length is not too easy, either.

4) But that's OK, because it's pretty hard to get a perfect rectangle on the wall.

5) If you find yourself whispering, "it is what it is," as you near completion of your DIY project, it is a pretty good indication that some (or most?) things did not go exactly as planned.

6) Most project flaws are best kept a secret.

And here's the closing image, just because I like the giant bright space with the huge chalkboard wall. Painting an entire wall is one way to avoid that nasty task of painting a rectangle.

Friday (un)Focus: DIY projects and chalkboard paint

I'm bookmarking this list of DIY ideas from Young House Love.

I like the industrial clips hung on tiny nails:

And the window covered with chalkboard paint:

Speaking of chalkboard paint ... Lately I've been tempted to use it to paint a big rectangle over the table in our kitchen. No frames or anything, so basically just a black rectangle on the creamy white walls. The idea loses its luster a bit when I think about what we'd actually write on the board. This is what the space currently looks like, except I've relocated the ship picture to its permanent place on the wall in the hallway.

Here are a couple pictures I pulled as examples. Truthfully, chalkboard paint is pretty trendy right now. But we could paint over it whenever we got tired of it.

Bleh, look at that red wall in the background and guess my thoughts on that beauty. I actually don't like that second photo much at all, except for the drawing (does Marc have that kind of talent?) and the shiny clock mounted on the blackboard.

So, what do you think? Paint or not paint? Besides the fact that it would be easy to paint over when we get tired of it (or move -- whichever comes first), another plus is that I've been looking for something big to hang on that wall for a while. I need it to be cheap, too.