Ok, I have a confession. I tend to take something fantastic, like chalkboards, and run with it until I’m crazy obsessed and overrun with an amazing collection of them.

Take for example, my fondness for ceramic birds. Or my fondness for yellow and blue and gray…

Or my overabundance of chairs…

You get the idea.

So, it’s no surprise that since I really like chalkboards, we now have five of them in our house…

Let me introduce you to the newest addition…

Ta-da!!

It’s pretty huge, right?

As in, it reaches almost to the top of our vaulted ceiling. Wowza. It’s the Cadillac of chalkboards.

Ok, to be fair, it’s perhaps one of those really old, kind of rusty, big honkin’ cars, but it’s still a Cadillac, and that’s what counts.

But I’m getting ahead of myself in the story. Let’s back up.

A few years ago, the church that I grew up in built a new addition onto the building and closed off the old, falling down, asbestos-filled side of the building. Slowly, they started to clean out the old part of the building. Then, right before they hired the crew to come remove all the asbestos, a bunch of things got sorted out for the dumpster.

Now to be clear, they didn’t just take everything and throw it away. They went through and sorted out the stuff that was still usable and still in good shape.

This chalkboard got tossed out because the surface is full of scratches and little holes, and the frame was broken on one side, making it unable to hang on the wall unless someone took the time to fix it.

I swooped in with my big heart and willing spirit to save this guy from the dumpster, loaded him up in my car, and carried him home to Wyatt so he could fix him up for me.

That was a year ago.

You can see a tiny glimpse of this guy stashed behind the rest of our someday-to-be-completed projects…

But, over the weekend, on our super-productive Sunday, we pulled him out from behind the pile of projects in the garage and got him fixed up. The frame turned out to be a pretty easy fix, for now.

The corners were put together with these old fashioned squiggle clamp things. Very cool. (I can’t find what those things are really called, and this article was the only one I could find that mentioned anything like it….)

One corner had rusted though, so it had cracked.

To fix it, we used a metal picture hanger bracket thing…which Wyatt flattened out.

Then, he carefully pre-drilled two small holes on each side.

This side wasn’t broken but since it showed the same rust damage, we went ahead and did it to be safe.

Then, Hubs screwed in our makeshift fastener and we were good to go!

 

As in, good to go all the way up to the ceiling!

You’ll notice I was in the middle of rearranging our summer decor for fall decor. Be on the look out for a post about that soon!

I just really appreciate the old scuffs, scrapes, and scars on this.

 

Wyatt also removed the chalk tray on the bottom since this was designed to be hung horizontally and we’re going to use it vertically. It left a few holes, but there were already some holes anyway from where it was meant to be screwed into the wall. There’s also some visible fade marks, but again, that doesn’t bother me.

I’m super excited for our free, salvaged artwork for the living room. We had such a big space to fill and such a limited budget (nothing) to fill it with. Score one for saving something awesome from a dumpster!

Tell me if you’ve ever saved anything from ruin? Ever seen those little squiggle corner clamp things before? I searched online for awhile and couldn’t find anything at all! Also, tell me how we should fasten this to the wall…as in, should it lean with a little hook at the top (similar to the way you hook a TV to the wall) or should we make a real hanging bracket for it? Keep in mind we need to be able to get it off and on fairly easily to change out what’s on the chalkboard…