Painting a chalkboard wall

I love chalkboards.  LOVE them.  With chalkboard paint available in not only black but also several other colors, you can put a chalkboard on pretty much anything.  I've painted cabinet doors, glass canisters, and now a wall.

When we moved in, the basement looked like this. 

Gradually we got organized and it started looking like this.  BORRRRRRING!  About the most you can say is that it is a bit more organized.

This area was our homeschool zone, so I needed it to be functional and fun.  The first thing I did was paint a chalkboard wall. 

The basement is really large and there's lots of natural light in here {there's a walkout to what used to be a pool, so I wasn't concerned about painting a black wall. We chose not to use a magnetic primer.  I've used it before with only marginal success after three coats.  At $20 per quart and a minimum of six coats likely, we opted for another route.  We bought five of these magnetic knife racks from Ikea and spaced them across the top of the wall.  They blend into the wall, but are very strong. 

The kids LOVE writing on the chalk board and love cleaning it even more.  Isn't that weird?  They like to take wet rags to it together and then blow on the wall until it's dry so that they can write again.  I don't know how much we'll use it in actual teaching, but it's a huge hit as a toy!

The basement is far from done.  In fact, until a couple of weeks ago this was the only wall down here that had been painted.  But it's a start.  I'll share some more basement updates next week.

p.s.  If you are interested in painting with chalk board paint, it's very easy.  It needs to be stirred really well, but it's not hard to apply or anything.  It comes in many colors now, or you can mix your own chalk board paint with recipes all over the internet.  I would like to try that sometime, but for this area, I really like the old fashioned black board look.