Fun Ideas for Painting Your Kitchen Table

The kitchen table may be a place you gather with your family for meals, to enjoy a morning cup of coffee and wind down after a long work day, but it is a large piece of furniture that may be plain and a bit of an eyesore. Change it up with a few cans of paint, which can take your table from something you want to cover with place mats to something you want to show off. Does this Spark an idea?

Bountiful Backgammon

Turn your kitchen table into the center of family activity by painting a game board right onto its top. Select a game that would be simple to paint, such as backgammon, which is played on a rectangle-shaped board with 24 triangle shapes divided into four quadrants. To make the board you need just two paint colors (or use the table's original color as one color of the colors). Paint the table top and let dry, then cut triangle shapes out of masking tape and place in position. Paint the table again, let dry, peel off the tape to reveal the triangles below and start challenging family members to a match. Other boards that lend themselves to simple kitchen-table painting include chess and checkers, which also require just two paint colors and a ruler to mark off the squares.

All Hands on Deck

Many parents track their kids' growth with a wall chart, where they mark off their child's height every month or year, showing how much growth has occurred. Instead of focusing on height, turn the tables and keep track of your kids' hands by painting them into a mural on your kitchen table. Pour paint into paper plates and have your child gently press one of his hands into the paint, then firmly press the hand onto the kitchen table, leaving behind a hand print. Use a different color for each hand, and different colors for each family member. Make multiple hand prints around the border of the table or just one for each hand per year, leaving room for an annual painting ceremony to show the difference in hand size over time. Keep a wash rag, water and kid-friendly soap on hand to quickly wash paint off children's hands before they take off and start leaving prints elsewhere around your home.

Great Graffiti

For a kitchen table painting activity with no rules and no regulations, let your creativity run free with graffiti. Graffiti may be thought to be something seen on the walls of inner cities, but the artistic process dates back to ancient Rome. Even Egyptian hieroglyphics could be considered graffiti, the art of writing on the walls. Take your table and head outside with a couple of cans of spray paint. Spray your family's name, a design, a favorite quote, a cartoon character or just an abstract design in an outline with a black paint, then fill it in with something neon bright. Graffiti's beauty is that you can't mess up; you're not following any guidelines and can make your table be as gritty or beautiful as you want it to be. With a graffiti kitchen table, everything is painting outside the lines.