{31 Days to a Brand new Room}Day 11: Chalk Art Headboard

If you're joining us for the first time today, this is day 11 of a 31 day series about how to give a room in your home a brand new look, from top to bottom, completely DIY.  

You'll find links to all the other posts in the series here, if you're interested.

As you know, we painted the walls in this room with a custom colored chalkboard paint.  There was a reason for that.  I had seen several rooms on Pinterest where they had used chalk art to make a huge impact.  Here's what I'm talking about:

{via Style at Home}

{via Design Sponge}

{via Decoist}

{via Decoist}

. . . and my personal favorite . . .

{via Shelterness}

I like to draw and chalk is SUPER inexpensive, so it seemed like a natural choice for this budget-conscious room makeover.  My daughter always hated her daybed before because the frame was in the way when she had to make it or change the sheets.  One of her big requests for this room was a new bed.  I'm not sure if this is what she had in mind originally, but she and I both love the way it turned out!

I followed that last example pretty closely because I liked it so much.  I just took a piece of chalk and free-handed it.  That's the nice thing about chalk art -- you can just keep erasing it until it looks exactly how you want.  I would recommend using a level when you start sketching it out so that your design doesn't get all wonky -- unless you want it to look wonky, which would be a fun look, too.

Because this is a headboard and it's going to have pillows rubbing up against it, I wanted to make sure it would stay put.  You could use liquid chalk markers {also called Bistro Chalk Markers}, but they can be kind of expensive.  I just used plain old chalk.  If you dip the chalk in water before you draw it tends to give you a more solid line that sticks to the wall better, but even that can rub off.  To help set the design, I sprayed the whole thing with hairspray when I was finished.  Yep, hairspray.  Just buy a can of cheapo Aquanet or something and spray it really, really well.  I worried that it would leave some kind of film on the wall that would make it obvious I had sprayed something there, but it didn't.  Once the hairspray was dry you couldn't tell it was there at all.  When you are ready to change your design, you can wash off the old one with some warm soapy water.

Sydney really, really likes the cute, whimsical addition to the room.  Have a great day, friends!  I hope you'll come back tomorrow to see how we made the frameless bed to go with our fun chalk headboard.