Yarns and Buttons: Chalk Wall - It Makes Writing on Walls OK

My sister has this room which was painted pink. It wasn't an ugly pink. It was just pink. She wanted to use it as a working studio or a craft room of some sort. She made the mistake of asking me for ideas on what to do with the walls. I said: LET'S MAKE ONE OF THE WALLS A CHALKBOARD!

Yay, right? Wrong! I mean, we didn't think it was wrong at first. We said: Whoo, that's awesome! Let's go pick an awesome color! And so we did. We picked an awesome grey color that would go great with the floor. But then things got tricky. Really tricky. The existing wall was texturized. We can't have a textured chalkboard! Nooooo. So my sister was the hero. She got a sander and she sanded that shit down. I think her lungs' lives just got shortened by a good 10 years due to inhalation of paint/wall dust. Oh, I forgot about lead poisoning, too. Oh man! My sister has stories on how much she suffered for that wall that could keep a whole weekend by the campfire entertaining.

Since I've always been a lazy butt, I only help out with the easy stuff like putting paint on the already sanded and primed wall.

Ah, this was the fun part. We had to mix non-sanded grout in with the paint so that chalk would later be erasable. Fun, no? Well, we um... didn't have a paint mixer and were too lazy to walk over to our parents' place to grab the drill...so my genius sister created this contraption.

Et, voila! Sticks taped to the stand mixer. It didn't work super well because the sticks were too skinny, so we switched it over to spoons later on.

We succeeded in mixing it enough that there were minimal chunks of grout in the paint. Then we painted a beautiful wall which we had to destroy immediately by smearing it with chalk. Why? Because someone told us that the chalk wouldn't erase easily if we didn't prime the wall first with chalk. So, we primed it with chalks.