Train board for Tucker! / Life Inspired

We can now say we're done with Tucker's train board... (phew) my pictures are very step by step chronologically taken so like it or not you will now get a tutorial on making a measly little train board like this one.... :)

First things first... make sure the child receiving the train set is watching and overseeing the important stuff.

I already had it set up downstairs the way we wanted it mounted on the board so we knew the measurements that the board needed to be. I debated and thought long and hard weather we wanted to make a train table or mount it to a train board. The board won out due to a couple things

a. it can be slid under their new bunk beds for storage if we want it upstairs

b. more maneuverable if down in the toy room.

c. and the main reason we decided to mount it to a board was because this particular train set (130 pc Melissa and Doug) has a lot of bridge/raised track and when Brooklyn was playing with it when I was setting it up, it kept moving and falling and she was getting mighty frustrated. I then imagined how much worse it would be with a two year old and all the pieces i would surely find everywhere and i quickly decided it was getting screwed in!!

Cutting the board to size...

Sanding it down good.

I then painted the whole thing a grassy green...

I bought a shimmer powder that i mixed with the blue to make it more like water. Very much an impulse buy but it was fun and makes it so much more sparkly :)

ta-da! Put a clear protective coat on and let it dry...

I mixed some darker green and stuck a couple forests on there too! (can you tell i had a little too much fin with this?!) Anyway, then just moved the track onto the board...

and screwed in each piece one at a time from the bottom up! (That way they aren't ruined if we decide to take it off the board years down the rd) This was a two man job that me and Daniel tackled tonight... and took a good hour or so.