The Word is Out: Your Children Paint the Walls: Here’s How to Let Them

It won't look like this for long... but you'll love watching your kids create. We think...

Let your kids paint the walls! It’s a free for all! Next you’ll be living in a van down by the river and your children will be selling flowers by the freeway to pay for kerosene to cook the crawdads you caught… down by the river. Okay, now that we have drawn out all your worst fears of the slippery slope that allowing your children to draw on the walls could be, here’s the truth: it’s really not that insane, we promise.

Don’t hang up—let us tell you more! By the time children are about 18 months to two years of age, cruising your digs with crayons, markers, nail polish, and Grandpa’s cough medicine is inevitable unless you hire full time SWAT to cover them. Instead of parking a flower delivery truck full of agents in front of your home to surveillance them, try this instead:

Create the largest canvas you can fit on a wall and hang that sucker up there. You won’t fool kids with dry erase boards, at least not for long. They’ll see it erased and the crying begins. They want that sense that they are sort of doing something wily, but the joke is on them!

• Hang your canvas with D-rings from the top or with a wire hanger using two or more Sexy Metal Hooks depending on the size of the canvas.
• Ensure the floor beneath them isn’t your ten billion-dollar travertine or “that tile your mother picked out” or carpeting (oh carpeting, when will you die?) You’ll want to hang the canvas in a room with a floor you don’t much care about and/or you can nail-gun down a tarp that goes behind the canvas and secure a large piece of Masonite on the floor that is both wide and long enough for your little scheming street artists to stand (and fling paint) on.
• In case it doesn’t go without saying, use nontoxic, washable paint just in case it does wind up hurling across the room onto your Ming Dynasty vase.

Once the canvas is covered from top to bottom and there’s no room to spare, tell your little Monets the canvas fairy will be visiting and tomorrow morning there will be a whole new, fresh canvas to paint! That’s code for mommy and/or daddy will be whitewashing that sucker on the lawn—but it beats the heck out of repainting your entire hallway or living room or trying to get colored airplane glue (where do they find this stuff?) off the walls.

To get the whole job done in one shot, check out the YOUHANGIT Designer Kit to hang your canvas with ease. Want to know more about how to hang the canvas for this project or how to hang any picture fast? Check out our picture, shelf, and mirror hanging FAQ page and you can always reach out to us on our YOUHANGIT Facebook page too—we’d love to hear from you and we’d love it even more if you sent us photos of your DIY projects!