Tried it Tuesday--dry erase menu board

I saw a pin (several, actually) on Pinterest a while back for a DIY dry erase menu board. It's been really challenging lately, with me working so much, to try to provide healthy, home cooked meals for the family. I guess I figured that with me working all the time, Martin would take over the grocery shopping and cooking. Theoretically, I guess he did, however, his idea of grocery shopping and meal preparation involves buying 5 boxes of Hamburger Helper, and a 5 lb tray of hamburger. *sigh* I don't criticize, because at least he's trying in whatever way he knows how, but we need to eat a little more healthfully than that. The other trap we've fallen into is eating out. A lot. We had been doing so well with not spending money in that area, but lately it's been a lot easier to spend money on things like that. Also not so good for our health.

So. I thought if I had a menu laid out for the week, that it wouldn't feel so overwhelming to make dinner every night. The only thing left is to get better about grocery shopping on a regular basis so we actually have food to assemble meals out of ;)

I found an old picture frame I had, I think it was just a cheap one from wal-mart. It was black with this gold trim around the edge. 

I wasn't a fan of the gold trim, so I painted the whole frame black:

I still haven't gotten to all my crafty stuff in our move-clutter, and I couldn't find a piece of black paper. I took the paper that came with the frame and painted it black. While I was waiting for both of those to dry, I cut out strips of colored paper using a crafty-edged scissors. Again, I had to improvise with what I had, and these aren't necessarily the colors I would've chosen myself. I had some black, sticky, vinyl letters, so I placed them on colored paper and cut a border around them. I adhered all of these to the paper I had painted black, using mod-podge. It's ironic to me that typing about this part of the process took a few lines (and minutes), but figuring out the strip measurements was probably the hardest and most time-consuming part of this project. This is what it looked like after I reassembled everything: 

Add a dry-erase marker, and voila, you have a dry-erase menu board :) The whole project probably took about 3 hours, and again, most of that time was spent in the measuring, cutting, re-measuring, and cutting the final time. And laying it out.


Here it is with our weekly menu written in. 

There's been a little resistance, and we've still allowed for some eating out (gotta have 5 Guys every once in a while) but hopefully, this will help us stay on track a little better. I'm thinking that once I unpack my crafty stuff, I'll try it again with different colors/layout/etc.