Growth Chart Board

I've always wanted to make a growth chart, but hadn't found a style I was sure I wanted to make until a friend of mine asked me to cut the vinyl for her to make a growth chart.  So that was easy to just cut a second set for myself.  We were going off the idea seen online in several places where we use a 1"x8" that is 6' long and stain it or paint it and apply vinyl numbers and lines to mark the inches.

All the boards I've seen online just show the board before the kid's heights are marked on the board, so I kinda had to figure that part out by trial and error to get what I liked best.  I decided to make a line at the height and then add my kid's name and age. 

I've decided to mark my kids on their birthday (give or take a few days) so that I can have each mark a year apart.  I've always written down my children's height, weight, and other stats from all their annual doctor appointments, so I was able to go back to their birth weight that way even though I hadn't been measuring them and marking it down myself each year. 

I also hung a picture of each of my kids next to the chart...that I'll change out as they grow.

The challenge I had was how to hang it up...if I hung it up with the standard picture hangers you can attach, my kids would just bump it or tug on it and it would fall down.  Not safe...so I actually decided to hang it up on the wall that is next to the refrigerator.  Our fridge sidles up to a wall, so on the opposite side of that wall, we just screwed the board to the wall from the back.  We pulled the fridge out, attached 3 screws through the wall (top, middle, and bottom) to the back of the board.  Since that side of the wall is hidden by the fridge, I wasn't worried too much that the screw would be visible and just slid the fridge back in.

The only thing I didn't like about how this turned out was that every knot is more noticeable when you stain the wood.