My youngest little guy LOVES to color. I wanted to make sure I incorporated his passion into our playroom designs. That is exactly why I chose to do a chalkboard accent wall.

Instead of doing straight up black chalkboard paint, I wanted to choose my own color. My choice; Restoration Hardware Flint. (I had it color matched in latex paint at Home Depot to keep it a little more budget friendly.)

To get from plain latex to chalkboard paint, I mixed 2 cups of the color matched paint and 4 Tablespoons non-sanded grout together. This worked beautifully.

Along with the help of my four year old, I applied two coats of this concoction to the wall and let it dry for 24 hours.

Then, I primed the surface with chalk. That way the first scribbles drawings on the wall weren’t our permanent artwork for the room.

Finally, to add an educational touch to the kid’s space, I choose to stencil the alphabet across the top of the accent wall.

This process took a little while, but was pretty easy.

I taped the stencils to the wall and chalked each letter. This way they can be easily changed if we so desire.

To touch up the ABC’s, I used a wet Q-tip to erase any unwanted markings.

We are in love with this wall. The boys enjoy coloring on it and so do I.

Now, if I can only make it clear to my two year old that this is the only wall we chalk on.  *sigh*

 

I have been working on redoing the flooring in our soon to be playroom and my first attempt didn’t go quite like I had planned. You can read all about my failure here.

After the disaster of the white washed parquet floors, I decided that straight up painting it was going to be my best bet.

First, I got to work by sanding the entire space and wiping off the dust. I wanted to remove all of the previous finish. I was hoping that this would fix all of the discoloration problems I had before, but it seems like most of the yellowing was actually seeping up from the wood, not just from the polyurethane I applied.

(I figured since I was no longer worried about what the floor looked like, I could work on other projects in that room before finishing it for the second time. I’ll share more on those projects in later posts.)

Next, a coat of primer was applied to the parquet. (You can see the yellow color bleeding through the primer on some of the tiles.)

Then, I mixed up my own paint color and applied two coats of it across the surface for good coverage. This took care of the seeping/bleeding issues. I sanded between each coat and loved how it was looking.

Finally, I added three coats of Minwax Water Based Polyurethane to give it a durable finish. This worked pretty good, except it left a different yellowish cast on the floor.

In some spots I thought it looked like what I imagine dried urine puddles would look like. I was able to sand it down a bit to get a more even look and the yellow was gone. If I were to do it all over again, (which I am not going to do) I would use Minwax polyacrylic instead of polyurethane. This would require me to maybe add a few more coats because the polyacrylic is not usually recommended for floors and this would make it last longer.

Yay! A floor I can finally live with! It was not exactly how I had planned it. But in the end, it was perfect!

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