apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

This reminds me of a public toilet, but without the phone numbers and solicitations for sex.

I love a drawing wall! My childhood friend's mother let her kids (and their friends!) doodle all over a wall near the entry way phone. It was awesome.

Well...... That's IT for me kiddo!

Adios, AT! Thanks and it's been great.

Oh no, we're not living up to somebody's standards - boo hoo!

Tip: if a community no longer serves you, exit silently. Announcing that you are leaving is so very high school drama queen. Nobody cares.

Now, back to the fun!
This does remind me of "for a good time call .." bathroom stalls, but for a temporary thing, before you decide what you're going to do, it's great!

I had to tear down 20-year old wallpaper in a bathroom once, and I hated every minute of it, but it would have made my job so much more enjoyable if I'd found a wall full of history like this underneath!
Kudos to you for having fun with it - though I hope you can break everyone of the habit when the paper comes in :)

I actually love this and now want to do this in mine (we've done similar with our fridge) complete however, with sex solicitations.

We did the whole wallpaper cycle in my family.

When I was little my mother had purchased wallpaper for our dining room which my father kept saying he'd put up. Weeks went by, and the walls were still bare. So, while my father was on a business trip, my mother started giving everyone markers to write on the wall - family, neighbors, kids, everyone. Among the many artistic endeavors was a statement by one young wife: "My husband doesn't understand me." The marriage didn't last too much longer (it was the 70s - divorce was definitely the thing to do). My father comes home and is finally shamed into papering the walls.

This becomes a family story, discussed at most holiday meals (it came right after when they would remind me how I innocently pasted a picture to the wallpaper when I was 6 - and look, you can still see the paper stuck to the wall!).

Then, in my 20s, my mother decides she's going to have the wallpaper professionally stripped and painted. They are coming a few days after Easter. So we jokingly pull a corner to see what's under there. Which quickly led to an easter dinner with everyone pulling down paper and howling with laughter at what had been written years ago. That was one of my favorite family affairs. I highly recommend writing projects like the above!

I did the same thing with roommates in a rental long ago in Weehawken. With the landlord's permission, we took down the ugly kitchen wallpaper, and before we put up the new stuff, we drew and wrote all over the walls. I hope someone has checked it out, since then, before making other changes.

Friends of mine left an entire wall to be drawn on. As you come into their Victorian row house the wall on the left that goes all the way up the stairs is now covered with various drawings. Every time I go over there, I bring a sharpie and draw something. At some point they'll paint/wallpaper over it, but right now it is glorious. They have many artist friends and there are always lots of kids around.

Kate:

That story rocks!!!

My childhood friend lived in a beautiful old house where her mother also grew up, and they had a closet that they let all visitors sign and decorate. So there are decades of signatures and doodles that they can fondly look back on. I think it's a lovely idea!

tsk tsk for Joanneb.

When you think of it, whether you like this or not, there's not much difference between this and using blackboard paint and then chalk, except this is white - and because that's "popular", most people seem to like it.

It's not my cup of tea, but I'd say it gets an A for creativity and it is, afterall, the home of someone who loves it, and isn't that what matters?

I forgot this........I think I see something by the sink that says "I love Mom". Ok, that's cool. Imagine seeing that every day. Very uplifting.

I don't know why people think design is about having specific pieces or keeping up with trends. Design should be what makes your spirit soar and IMO, anything written on a wall that says "I love Mom" is pretty good. There's a happy family....

You know what I love about this, is that it DOES draw a parallel to public restrooms, but it's totally innocent. It's like official graffiti murals. I love it.

Kate,
that story reminds me of one of the short stories in English Lit anthologies!

Was it called Barn Burning? The story in which the wife shamed the husband into moving the family home into the brand new barn because he wouldn't build a new house. not quite the same, but it reminded me of it.

CC

Is this what you are talking about, Click Click?

http://www.nku.edu/~peers/barnburning.htm

We did this in my house growing up in the stairwell to the basement.

There was a segment on an episode of "If Walls Could Talk" that showed a house where the owners threw all kinds of parties and their friends would draw pictures on the walls of one room. Well it turns out that the owners were artists and so were their friends (eventually well-known artists) and the current homeowners discovered quite a treasure during renovation.

A friend of mine did something similar...only she painted a bathroom wall with chalk paint and put a bucket of colored chalk in there....as well as a shelf of favorite toys...mr. potato head etc. It really along with bright yellow paint on the other walls and whimsical shower curtain it really improved a pretty dreary room for not too much money

I like it. I renovated a bungalow in Houston a couple of years ago. The paint peeled off in big crackly pieces, revealing height markings and ages for the children. Next to a rather tall marking was written the name "Shorty".

I gutted a house, and while the walls were down, the workers wrote in Spanish all over the walls between the studs. I had a friend over who was fluent, and he told me it was all dirty limericks and poems. He said it was quite good, but VERY dirty. This was in the '70's, and he refused to translate as it was just too rude. After the house was restored to it's 1920's finest, it creeped me out as long as I lived there. The house had a weird vibe, like it was haunted.

I think this is my favorite comments section ever.

This doesn't remind me of a public restroom; it reminds me of growing up in NYC in the 70s and 80s when the big fad was paper tablecloth covers with crayons in a glass next to the S&P. I always loved that and I still do.

I had a friend growing up with cool artistic parents who let her write and draw on the walls in her bedroom through high school. I could barely get my Mom to let me put up posters because tape would peel the paint and FunTak left stains.

I was sooooooo jealous of Simone's room!

When we stripped the wallpaper in our victorian house last year we found signatures underneath - helped us trace the history of the house no end

I love Cate's, ScienceGeek's, and Team Decor's stories! (And I think it's chilly and sad that Joanneb doesn't get it.)

Not writing on the wall per se, but here's my contribution--In the wonderful old house we lived in, a bathroom radiator slyly leaked over time, and when we discovered this, we had to rip up some soggy old flooring. The house had huge, hand-hewn beams, so the space under the floor was pretty deep. It was kind of thrilling, because we realized no one had been in there since about 1840. We decided to improve upon matters, of course. When my son was little, he assembled a life-sized human skull from a kit. Not only did it look perfectly real, it even yellowed and darkened the way real bones do. You know what we did with it before we put in the new flooring! Who knows if anyone will ever find the skull, but if they do . . . oh my!

There's a wonderful old plantation outside of Charleston, SC, called Drayton Hall (click on my name for their website) that has been left more or less empty so you can wander through the bare bones Georgian Palladian architecture. On one doorframe (in what is, I believe, now referred to as the "growth chart room") are the height measurements for generations of the family that lived there from the mid-1700s until the 1970s, including a pet or two. It's absolutely wonderful.

It's a wonderful idea!

I grew up in a home that was built in 1918, and one year, my parents took the dining room walls down to the studs during a renovation and found a very old report card some kid had shoved underneath some wallpaper. Needless to say, he wasn't making very good marks, but it's so cool that we now have that little bit of history from our home.

That is so cute! For a long time, I've thought about buying a large canvas to have everyone mark on when they came to my place, and you've inspired me! Thanks for sharing this before you cover it. I understand the need for change.

Might be cute to take photographs of it and frame pieces of it.

i think this is also my very favourite AT discussion thread ever!

What a cool idea - photographing the drawings and framing them! It would be so neat to hang a photo or two in the same spot where the original drawing lies beneath the wallpaper, and would give visitors an idea of what's going on under there.

Funny enough, AT Nursery is talking about the chalk version: http://nursery.apartmenttherapy.com/nursery/look/look-jeanines-motivating-bathroom-019931

And growing up, in the home of one of my friends they had a guest bathroom that anyone was allowed to write/draw on the walls. No need to supply bathroom reading when there are fascinating notes and doodles all over the walls. I'm not 100% sure, but I think might have been over some old ugly wallpaper that they planned to remove someday.

When I was a kid my Dad painted the bathroom walls white and then let my sister and me, then 7 and 9, paint a large mural spanning three of the walls. We painted large, wildly colored parrots flying high about the room, and added a big tree trunk and some vining branches out from there. We did it all with acrylic paints. It was fun, it didn't take long, and a friend of the family who visited was so impressed with it that he 'commissioned' us to do his bathroom!

If you have some young kids around, let them paint a mural for you. You'll be amazed at the fluidity of their lines and the artistry of their compositions. Most kids are really talented! Just be sure they have at least a semi-joyful subject matter.