Decorating on the Cheap: Chalkboard Border

Our house was built in 1972, and although the previous owners had done a few updates, much of that was left to us. They were also big fans of country decor, which we are decidedly not. Examples include a Texas-themed bathroom, complete with navy and white walls; pattern-bedecked wallpaper in the entry, and Americana border in the kitchen.

When we finally got around to updating the kitchen, we started trying to remove the border and learned pretty quickly what a difficult job it was going to be. We’d removed the wallpaper from the entry pretty easily, so we were armed with false hope that this would be an easy job too.

We chipped away at the first layer of border, only to find another floral border underneath. This second layer of border had been primed over, making it harder for the stripping chemical to soak through, but we finally got that layer off… only to find yet ANOTHER layer of border, adhered directly to the drywall. Check it out – definitely original to the house, don’t you think? Who wouldn’t want lime green and burnt sienna apples adorning their kitchen?

Um… us.

So, we started tackling the last layer of border only to discover that removing it meant removing part of the drywall too – not a good thing! We wanted to finish this project as economically as possible (and, let’s be honest, as quickly as possible too – there was the rest of the kitchen to finish working on!) so we came up with a solution that worked perfectly for us – texturing over the border.

Brian already had a big tub of joint compound that he’d used for an art project in college and then for tiling our bathroom floor, so he used that to skim over the border area (after we had carefully cleaned and sanded the surface). We thought about picking a color and painting over it, but then quickly settled on using chalkboard paint instead.

Chalkboard paint is great for a lot of household projects. Brian’s dad has a huge portion of his kitchen wall painted with it, and uses it as a calendar/memo board. I’ve seen people paint the walls of playrooms, which is great for letting kids get creative without having to worry about removing crayon or marker from white walls, for instance!

Back to our project. We bought a small can of chalkboard paint at Lowe’s for about $8. We applied the paint with a roller and brush, just like we would any other paint. I read that it can be difficult to get a smooth coat, but we already had a textured finish so it wasn’t a problem for us. We applied three coats to get it looking like we wanted, and then got to the fun part – figuring out what to write!

We decided we didn’t want to just write a quote around the room – partially because we wouldn’t be able to agree on a quote! Instead, we wrote the general contents of each cabinet around the room. There were a couple of spots that didn’t have cabinets beneath them, so we took some creative liberty. Brian is a graphic designer, so he chose to write some greeking (Lorem ipsum…) in one area. In another, I chose to write one of my favorite scriptures, Jeremiah 29:11.

We were really happy with the overall project, and guests almost always comment about it being one of their favorite parts of our house. Here are a few photos of the finished product!

We aren’t subtle with our labels…

Brian wanted to write “waste receptacle” – I wanted to write “trash.” We compromised.

I love the way the white and black contrast against each other. You can also see a little of the texture here.

Have you used chalkboard paint anywhere in your home?