I love the large wooden ruler growth charts that are popular right now and wanted to make one for our family.  How clever to use a detachable piece of wood so you can move it with you from home to home?  How many of you used actual walls and door jams??  Why didn’t we think of this!?

They are inexpensive, usually around $30-$40 for un-personalized, but we were looking for a simple project and an excuse to use our engraver tool we got for Christmas.

It turns out you can buy the perfect piece of 1X6 wood at your local home improvement store and go from there. No cutting necessary!

We stenciled out the numbers and ‘Pawelek,’ in a font we dowloaded from here, simply by printing them off the computer and tracing over them extra hard so it transferred to the wood.  We measured and drew the hash marks starting with 6 inches and ending with 6 feet 6 inches.  Next we used our handy dandy engraver tool to trace the hash marks, numbers, and our last name.

We decided to use a gray stain to be different but still neutral, plus we thought you could see our measurements better than if we used the darker stains found throughout our house. The stain didn’t sit as dark inside the engraved parts so I went back over with some black paint and then sanded it down for a softer look.

We found the perfect place upstairs by the kids’ rooms and bathroom and made our first marks,  Joe says every time we measure we have to take a picture so here we are!  Little did we know Joseph was 20 3/4 inches…