Dry Erase – Chalk Board Menu Sign

Since we’ve changed our eating habits our meals are more planned out in advance where as before they rarely were. This means now there has been a piece of paper magneted to the fridge that had the weeks dinner menu on it. I thought it would be nice to do something different than this and the first thing that came to mind was a chalkboard. I didn’t like the idea of the chalk dust floating around in the kitchen so my next thought was a dry-erase board but I don’t really like the looks of those white boards. Then I had what I thought was a great original idea… what about combining the two? Well a Google search comfirms there’s no such thing as an original idea and landed me here. Wow! that is cool. And even though I knew mine wouldn’t turn out near as nice I went for it anyway.

I made the thrift store rounds in search of a frame. The first thing I found was the chalkboard for .99. Another thrift store I found the frame I liked but it had no glass. Fortunately though the same store had another frame the same size with glass. I think each frame was around $4.

The chalkboard didn’t work all that well so I gave it a coat of chalkboard paint I had on hand.
My intent was to paint the frame another color but instead I decided to keep it original and just add to the existing patina/distress. I sanded to distress it further and then gave it a clear coat. I wrote in white chalk on the chalkboard and then placed it in the frame behind the glass. I can now write the weeks dinner menu in dry-erase marker on the glass. Maybe some day I’ll make an attempt to do better chalk writing.