Bandwagon: Chalkboard Paint

Did you know that new refrigerator's that are counter depth and not ugly are expensive? Well, I am here to tell you, they are. Our house came with a fridge and while it is not the most beautiful thing, it keeps stuff cold (knock on wood). So it's sticking around. But after living through the gut renovation of the house it wasn't looking so hot. It actually stayed in the downstairs, uncovered and unplugged during the whole renovation (while we were out of the house) and we would keep things that we didn't want to disappear in the freezer...geniuses we are. Anyway, so I decided a couple of weeks ago to try and spruce this beauty up. And of course, what better way to jazz up a fridge than with chalkboard paint...or so the design blogs told me.
Here it is in all its glory.

First I removed the handles. I decided they didn't need to stay because you can open the fridge by grabbing the door, and they were ugly.

Then I lightly sanded the whole thing with 80 grit sand paper to rough things up and put on one coat of primer. I just used the primer that was recommended on the chalkboard paint can for metals and plastics, but I read other places that some people used metallic primer or none at all...but I don't care about magnets. Oh and at this point we moved it out of the tiny cramped addition into the future kitchen space so that the final coats didn't get banged up when we squeezed it out of there.

After one coat of chalkboard paint.

And after two! I'm debating doing a third coat. I don't know why. It looks fine, and the can didn't specify, but maybe I read on some other blog that three coats was recommended?

That's it! I opted not to paint the parts behind the doors (see the white strip below?) because that would have involved opening the doors to paint and then leaving them open to dry...and, well, we have food in our fridge. A very small amount of food. But still, I didn't feel like moving it to a cooler, which was my only idea and sounded kind of sketchy. But it's not so bad. Kind of looks like the fridge has a pinstripe. Ohhhhh, fancyyy.

Now we just have to "season" it after a couple days and then write away. Or after I put a third coat on. Whatever.