Growth Chart Pinterest Fail and Lessons Learned

You know those super cute growth charts that I'm sure you could buy on Etsy? Buy them. 

It totally looks fine. But here's what happened. I spray painted the board white because I thought our landing was a little dark. Forgot about the board. Left it in the pouring rain all night. Ran over it in my car on the way to work. 

Spent a month debating whether to spend $8 on a new board, or salvage my current one.

Sand down the board. Repaint. Run out of paint. Run to Lowes. Look for number stencils, but can't find any. Finish painting.

Pinterest tells me to do a long line of painters tape down the length of the board (pictured below) so each of the lines stop at the same point (each of the foot lines, the half foot lines, etc. you keep moving the tape forward). Great. 

Then pinterest tells me to put two pieces of painters tape close together. Paint the line black. Remove the tape. I do this and the black has seeped under the tape and looks awful. Pinterest also told me to paint it white first, so the paint that seeps is white, and then paint it black. So now I have to wait for the the paint to dry twice. I only taped up some lines at a time. Because the tape was bigger than an inch, I couldn't do all the lines at once - they were too close together. So things were taped in phases. Paint had to dry in phases. This is fun.

I'm 95% finished with the lines and then I realize that a friggin ruler and a Sharpie would have worked better than hours of watching paint dry. Really, pinterest? Really?

(I taped off where the numbers would go, hence the squares. But one long line of tape, the tape measure to get the right spots, plus that ruler at the bottom to get the lines straight. Move the tape in as you want smaller lines. It would have taken me five minutes. WHY??)

So then I paint the number 2. Realize that I can't go up or I'm going to smear the 2. So I go to the top, paint 5. Then 3. Crap. In the 4 spot. So I sand over the 3. Spray the white over it. Wait for it to dry. Accidentally spray the 5 and the 2. Repaint the 5 and the 2. Paint the 4 (finally). And the 3. 

Not worth it. 

Also, I kinda wish I had made the board longer and had the 6 at the top.

But, none the less. We have a growth chart to measure our children on. One month and 92 hours of painting later. 

If you make one - get 5.5 feet of board to have the six, use the sharpie and the ruler. And don't leave your board in the rain and run over it. People should pin this. Why is it never the easy way?

Remember those coasters I made? There's one million pins of incredibly complicated ways of making coasters out of tile. Aint nobody got time for that.