Encouraging Creativity: Painting my daughter’s bedroom
My daughter Ruthie, age 10, has had the same bedroom layout since we moved to Minnesota five years ago. When she asked if she could re-do her bedroom, we decided to use this as a chance to provide an outlet for her creativity.I was inspired by Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture where he showed pictures of his childhood bedroom.
From Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture – his childhood bedroom
Technology has made our lives easier since then, however, so there is actual ‘whiteboard’ paint that turns a portion of your wall into a whiteboard.
The before photo:
Step 1: This step occurred the day before painting. My wife took out some graphing paper and she and Ruthie made a scale drawing of her bedroom, with scale two-dimensional models of the furniture. This allowed them to move the furniture around several times without any back-aches for me! Ruthie had to do all the math for this, although she was enjoying this so much she professed to us “this isn’t math.”
Step 2: I went to my local Home Depot to purchase the whiteboard paint, and, while there, saw they sell paint that makes the walls magnetic too.
Step 3: I put primer down first on the wall where we would be putting the whiteboard and yellow border. After the primer, we painted a rough middle section with the magnet paint. Knowing this would be painted over, I wasn’t too concerned about being exact. It worked out fine, but if I had to do it over again, I’d have been more precise, you do notice a little difference.
Step 4: We put up a tape border around the section of the wall where the whiteboard paint would be. We painted the whiteboard section first (two coats) and then waited a day. The next day we painted the yellow around the wall. And when I say we I mean we. Everyone helped, and Ruthie did a fair bit of the painting herself.
Results:
In this last photo, she has created a door that leads into her brothers room. As long as they don’t actually knock out the wall to create a real door, I think we’re in good shape.
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Love it Kevin! And as it turns out, I have a quart of dry erase paint – this helps me see how to get it on the wall!