AE Update | A New Home For The Advent Boxes

Some of you might remember these AdventBoxes I put together back in 2007 (inspired by a project I'd seen in Martha Stewart's Kids magazine).

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a project (with a bunch of help from Chris) to paint the one long wall in our laundry room with both magnetic + chalkboard paint. I thought this would be a cool spot for this Advent calendar and a cool place for Anna (and Simon) to use chalk or play with other magnets (like this alphabet set).

Here's a couple before photos of our laundry room (it's right off the kitchen):

I stripped off the wallpaper border and then we got down to business of painting the magnetic paint first.

A couple of coats later we added a couple coats of chalkboard paint (they were just about the same color) and called it good.

To get the boxes to "stick" to the wall I used magnetic tape from Michael's. I used 2-4 strips per box. I put a couple strips on before I could tell that the adhesive on the magnetic strips needed a bit more reinforcement so I used red line tape to stick the tape to the back of the boxes.

So far they seem to be sticking ok. I'm not planning to put anything heavy inside the boxes and anticipate that they will get re-arranged and moved around throughout the month.

Now if I could just change up the floors...

She seemed to like it.

He definitely liked it.