KE Class-Works: Classroom Cupboard Makeover!

It is time to talk about getting your classroom ready for the school year! Whether you have been teaching for what seems like a life time, this is your first year or you land some where in between it is always fun to decorate and style your classroom. Of course we love making our classroom look like our own! Face it, we practically live at the school for nine months! So we need to make it as warm and inviting and functional as possible. But, what do you do with a room that is at least 30 years old and have colors that you don't love or match your decor?! Of course paint!! The first thing we are going to tackle are those "lovely" cupboards. You know that blue that was popular in the 70's? That's what the color of our cupboards was! Oh man it was awful. So we thought about what we wanted to use our cupboards for first. We have seen a lot of people tape different things on the cupboards or use it to tape the words for their word wall. If you use the good kind of tape, the one that stays up all year long, it almost always leaves a sticky residue that never fully comes off. If you try to use masking tape you'll end up constantly trying to put it back up. The struggle is endless!

So why not be able to just write directly on your cupboards?! The perfect solution is to paint chalk board paint on the cupboards!! The paint covers up the nasty color and it gives a lot of additional space to quickly write words or leave different messages for your class to read. Of course you are going to want to ask permission from your principal or district since the paint is permanent.

Just look how cute these chalkboard cupboards turned out!

The first thing to do is to buy the paint. We went to Lowes and bought the Valspar brand of interior all purpose latex primer. It cost just under $12. We used one can of primer to do all the cupboards (the inside too). We highly recommend tinting the primer since leaving it white was harder to cover. We just asked them to tint it as dark as they possibly could which made it gray. Then we purchased the Lowes Valspar brand of black chalkboard paint. It cost just under $10 a can.

We bought 3 cans of the chalkboard paint, but used about 2 1/2 cans total. It was nice to have just that little extra for touch ups.

After you have purchased all your paint and paint brushes (we rolled our paint on with the roller brush and foam brush pictured above) you can start to tape off different parts of the wall in order to not get any paint on things that don't need to be painted. Now you are ready to paint! We painted two coats of primer. We waited about 2-4 hours in between coats. We were also doing two classrooms at one time.

After the primer is dry (we waited 24 hours on ours) you can start to paint with the chalkboard paint! We painted three coats of the chalkboard paint. And again we waited about 2-4 hours in between coats. Then we let it dry for about 24 hours.

Now you have fabulous cupboards that look amazing and you can write on them!! So fun in a classroom! Look how amazing our before and after of our cupboards are!