When kids go back-to-school (I can make anything about back-to-school) they come home with massive amounts of paperwork. A lot of it is school work but a majority of it, when dealing with preschoolers and early elementary students, is art. Unfortunately, I don't live in an art gallery where we can line our white walls with all their pieces and invite our friends over for wine and cheese and condescending talk about use of color and movement. So instead you hang the art on the refrigerator but unless you have a wall full of commercial fridges, eventually you'll run out of space for all the art your children bring home. I always liked this solution from Pottery Barn Kids, but was reluctant to spend that much money on a piece of wood with binder clips attached to it. When my husband and I decided to repaint and organize our back stairway landing, we made them ourselves, at less than half the cost of the Pottery Barn clips.

Materials you’ll need:

• 1x3 poplar board in the length you need to fill your space. (We used a six foot board and cut it into three smaller boards. The wood cost about $5 for an 8 foot length.)

• Paint (we used the same color as the rest of the trim in our house so we already had it)

• ”Bulldog” Binder Clips You can find these at any office supply store, but shop around. I bought them at the last minute in desperation to get the project done and could have found them much cheaper online.

• Saw or Jig Saw I swear this is not as scary as it sounds.

• Wood Screws Both to attach your clips to the boards but also to attach the boards to the wall (you’ll need to drill holes for that as well).

Begin by painting your board, you don’t want to do this once it’s attached to the wall.

Next measure the space you’d like to fill with your wall art clip.



Transfer those measurments to your board.



To cut to size, the easiest way is to use a hand held jigsaw, it is fast and incredibly easy (don’t be afraid of the jig saw).



But you could also use a handsaw to make the straight cut.



Once that is done, you’ll need to attach the boards to the actual wall using wood screws. Find the stud using a stud finder or by knocking. If you can’t find a wall stud, use a little adhesive on the back of the wood before you screw it into the wall (as at your hardware store what type of adhesive is best).

Now that your boards are on the wall you’ll want to attach your bulldog clips using wood screws through the back hole of the clip, evenly spacing them along the length of your board.



Voila!



Just fill with all those art projects and you’re done.



If we’d filled our back hall with the same number of clips from Pottery Barn we would have spent about $50. Instead we spent $15 for everything we needed to make the back hall a space to display our kid’s artwork.