Sometimes you just need to scribble on the walls. In recent weeks, I’ve fallen off of a morning exercise habit—long story. Just takes a few seconds for me to scribble out a calendar grid so I can begin a “don’t break the chain” reboot.

We have three of these chalk boards in our house now. It’s simply paint, (it actually has a lot of blue in it, as real slate does,) and you can probably find labeled-as “chalk board” paint anywhere you buy paint. The trick that no one mentions is that you have to sand the wall with fine sandpaper—chalk boards are smooth, and walls are actually not very. Then a few feet of what’s called “brick mould” cross drilled and screwed to the wall, and finally a few sticks of sidewalk chalk.

Oh, one more trick: If you look closely at the image, midway down on the left, there’s a tiny, smooth, rounded nail head barely visible. I drove that fully into the wall, before I painted the chalk board. It enables me to stick magnets to the wall in a few places, so it’s easy to tack up pieces of paper with little magnets too.

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