Menu Board DIY

If you do your grocery shopping in bulk, go shopping with list in hand, or just want to be more organized with your meal planning (or want to START meal planning), a menu board is definitely a simple, easy way to make planning and shopping quick and painless!

I normally go grocery shopping once a month (YES, once a month!) so I have a nice big list of go-to meals that I pick from and make my monthly meal plan in my Home Management binder (which I will discuss in another post =]) and then I make my grocery list from my monthly meal plan. I won't sugar coat it, planning out meals for an entire month takes a good chunk of time...depending on how cooperative my baby is I can usually get it all accomplished in about half and hour to an hour. It's so much easier now that I have this Menu Board with special menu cards!

My work does an auction for employees once they have accumulated a bunch of stuff, and the most recent one they had a lot of freebies, MY FAVORITE! I had been looking for a decent size picture frame or something like that for a while to use for the menu board instead of a white board which is JUST as useful, but I wanted it displayed in our dining room instead of our office, so I wanted something, well...prettier.

 This was my find! I believe it was meant to hold some type of calendar, but no matter, I was going to use it for my menu board!

I love espresso colored furniture, so I decided on a nice brown for a base. This Menu Board actually matches the re-do I did of my filing cabinet. 

I found my color at my local WalMart and settled on Rustoleum's Dark Brown and was around $5. I DID lightly sand the front and sides of the frame. I didn't do the middle, since I was using scrapbook paper there. 

I did 2 coats of spray paint, allowing it to dry in between, about 2 hours between coats.
The next day when the spray paint was completely set, I did one coat of Matte Mod Podge to the base of the board, stuck on the scrapbook paper and smoothed it out with a discount card I had laying around until there were no more bubbles or wrinkles in the paper. Then I did two more coats of Mod Podge, allowing it to dry in between coats. This took about an hour in total.

I had a fine tip Gold paint marker and used it to write "Menu" and "Bon Appétit!" on the top and the bottom of the board. I don't have excellent penmanship but this did the job.
After that was dry, I took the board back to where I was spray painting and did the final Acrylic Sealer coat, the brand I used was Treehouse from Hobby Lobby and was $5.99. I let this dry over night.

Finished Menu Board!

 Once the board was dry, I got out 7 of my wooden clothes pins and wrote the days of the week on them with a permanent marker in a contrasting color (I had a Turquoise one on hand) so that they would stand out a little bit. I got out my trusty hot glue gun and started gluing them in place. I found it easiest to lay them where I wanted them and then just lift them up, glue the clothes pin and then replace so that I didn't have to eyeball it every time.

Once the board was finished and up, I fixed up my cards! I had a lot of the colored index cards on hand, so I took a permanent marker and wrote the name of the meal on the blank side and wrote the ingredients needed for that particular meal on the back of the card, the side that was lined. All of my cards are in alphabetical order in a little envelope on my desk by the board.

  Total Project Cost = approx $13 (only because I didn't already have the acrylic sealer, otherwise the project was $7!)

This is how I chose to make my menu board and there's LOTS of other ways to go about making one for yourself. I hope this gives you inspiration for your own and I'd love it if you shared how you made yours! =]

xoxo,