Chalkboard Wall!

When I was in elementary school, there was a small flower shop at the bottom of our street, along with a few other small stores. Two of my older brothers were playing behind those stores when they discovered that the dumpster behind the flower shop was filled with flowers! They must have been too old to sell (the flowers...not my brothers), and while most of the flowers were falling apart or dead already, my brothers managed to salvage 5 or 6 dozen flowers, mostly roses. They took the flowers home and set them all over the house for my mom. Cool, right? My mom obviously thought they stole them until she heard the story. 

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that dumpster diving can be an effective means of showing your affection to those you love by acquiring things for them that they value more than the people who threw them away. More on this later...

I am personally a big fan of this most recent project of my wife's. She has been interested in painting something in our house with chalkboard paint for quite some time now. First it was the refrigerator. Then it was the kitchen table. We don't own a particularly nice fridge or kitchen table, so I was actually pretty open to it.

Then she settled on this:

This is the left wall of our dining room, and to the left is the kitchen. This wall is also shared by the pantry. After much deliberation about what she would paint to look like a chalkboard, she was determined to do this wall. It wasn't until after the wall was painted that it occurred to us that it's actually about the same size as a chalkboard. 

Here's a view from the front.

The washed out square in the middle of the chalkboard wall (keep in mind that I take all of these pictures with my smart phone when my wife isn't looking) is a picture frame with nothing in it. In reference to the story I told at the beginning of this post, I actually found that frame in our neighbors garbage can when I was taking my own garbage out late one night. It didn't have any glass or anything, and it was a glossy black. I didn't have to dive into any dumpsters for this prize, but it goes to show that a little care and creativity can extend the life of something that otherwise might have been considered disposable.

It's fun for me to watch a transformation take place in a part of our house that I wouldn't have given much notice otherwise. Although it just occurred to me we're probably going to have to paint over this again eventually when we sell our house. Yikes.