How To Make A Dry Erase Wall DIY Tutorial

Having a whiteboard wall at home can be really useful and often easier and cheaper than installing a dry erase board. You can use one for so many different things - in a play area for children or in a home office. It is actually really easy to make a whiteboard wall - here is a full tutorial for how to make a dry erase wall.

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How to use the Rustoleum Doodle Wall Kit To Make A Dry Erase Wall
How to remove dry erase paint from the wall?
Where can I make a dry erase wall?
Where to buy dry erase wall paint
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We absolutely love the playroom in our new house. It is great to have somewhere that the children can call theirs and get creative, display their artwork and make a mess without me worrying about it. If you missed the tour of our playroom you can see it here. A dry erase wall (or whiteboard wall) makes such a great addition to a playroom as it gives your little one the space to get creative, and the best thing about dry erase walls is that they can easily rub it all off and start again, and you're not wasting reams of paper on their artwork! Read on if you want to know more about how to make a dry erase wall.

All three of my children love drawing and writing so I thought a writable surface space for them to write and draw would be great. Rustoleum sent me a big box of DIY supplies at the end of the summer and included in there was a whiteboard wall kit called Doodle Wall. As we have just had the playroom decorated I didn't want to risk painting the entire wall but I thought I would make the back of the door into a whiteboard for them and it is a great alternative to a traditional whiteboard.

How to use the Rustoleum Doodle Wall Kit To Make A Dry Erase Wall

The kit contains everything that you need. You just mix part A with part B and stir like crazy. I don't think I stirred ours enough because the paint was quite runny so stir stir stir!!

You then just roller the dry erase wall paint on. You don't need a base coat but for best results I would recommend finely sanding and cleaning the area you are going to paint to make sure that you have a smooth surface. I marked out lines where I wanted ours to go so I just needed to use the roller to paint between the lines.

Like I said, ours was a bit runny and needed a couple of coats because of this but I think that was due to me not stirring it enough. It will be easier to work with and require less coats if you stir it more I think.

I left it to dry for 4 hours and then it cured for 5 days until we could write on it. That required a lot of patience!

The washi tape peeled off and left us with a shiny white surface - we had made a whiteboard door! The important thing is to be careful when you rip the tape off though! You can use frogtape which I think would give more high quality results, we just didn't have any when I was doing this. Rip the tape off slowly to make sure that you don't remove any of the paint from the wall or door.

I bought some whiteboard pens or dry erase markers which are perfect and rub off the dry erase boards really well. The girls are delighted with their new space to be creative and it has given them a really durable writing surface!

Make sure they use special dry erase pens and every now and then give the whiteboard surface a really good clean with a damp cloth to get rid of any stubborn marks and keep it looking nice and white. If you use a permanent markers by mistake you might want to resort to the use of alcohol or permanent ink remover to get off the marks and return the whiteboard wall to it's original color.

a child drawing on a dry erase board with a yellow whiteboard pen

How to remove dry erase paint from the wall?

I haven't actually tried to remove the paint myself but I imagine if you wanted to you could just sand it down and paint over it. Or if you wanted to remove it completely use a paint solvent. This would ruin the painted wall underneath too of course so you would need to repaint the whole area, which you would probably do anyway either way. If you have had to remove whiteboard paint before do leave me a comment to let me know how it went.

I made a little film of me making the whiteboard wall for YouTube if you'd like to see a step-by-step video application guide of this dry erase coating.

Where can I make a dry erase wall?

You can put DIY whiteboards pretty much anywhere you like with this whiteboard paint kit. We put it on the back of the door in the playroom so that the children had a nice large whiteboard area to use but you could very easily put it on a blank wall, low down if you are intending it for children to use and with this remarkable whiteboard paint you can make the whiteboard area different sizes to suit.

It would also work really well on home office walls or a meeting room or conference rooms, more of us are working from home now and a board to write notes and important things on could be really useful. It would also be helpful if you were doing presentations online, using it to brainstorm ideas or running training sessions, to help to illustrate your points in a more visual way. You could also use it as a projection screen as the white surface would make the perfect background to play videos on, especially if it is on a colored wall.

A dry erase wall would also be great for home schooling - you could paint one in your dining room, or whatever area you use to home school and it would become a great spot for you and the children to visually demonstrate learning topics, especially if you have more than one child.

You could also use this paint on other DIY projects around your home. With this paint any surface could become a dry erase surface! The instructions say that it is suitable for painted interior surfaces such as plasterboard, hardboard, wood, cement and metal so why not experiment and see what you can upcycle? I have also used chalkboard paint to create spaces for my children to be creative - this is a lot easier than using whiteboard paint but I do find that the chalks are messier long term!