Bouncing off the wall: Make an ideas board

“That’s a big to-do list!” people say the first time they come into my kitchen. Then they look a bit closer. “Oh, no, it’s not a to-do list, is it?...What's lock-hopping?!”

Nope, this is absolutely not a place to scribble down drudgy things like ‘Milk, bread, bananas’ or ‘Fix toilet roll holder’. This is an ideas board. Inspiration for future fun and life-to-be-lived. Somewhere to put good ideas magpied from magazines or websites or the outside world. Somewhere to put those ideas that ping into my head when I'm in the shower or that boing out of a conversation with a friend. 

The board is divided into sections: Places to go, Things to do with Little Kid, Things to do with Big Kid (an incredibly shrinking section now that doing stuff with your mother is so not cool), Food we could make, Holidays we could go on (or dream of going on!) and Random, the section for all the things that don't fit any other section. And of course, what's on the board constantly evolves as I rub off the things we do and new ideas come bobbing along.

Making it was easy. It’s a piece of MDF painted with blackboard paint and screwed to the wall. Simples. But its more powerful than the sum of its parts. Here's what it does.

1. It gives us a grab-and-go idea whenever we need one. Having a family day out? Rainy day and want to do something arty-crafty at home? Half-term coming up and want to go away for a few days? Feel like cooking something new for dinner? It saves us starting from scratch and scrabbling around for an idea every time we need one.

2.It makes things happen! Having these ideas constantly hovering in front of my eyes when I’m unloading the dishwasher or getting peas out the freezer keeps them fresh in my mind and makes them much, much more likely to happen. It turns a ‘we could do that one day’ mentality into a ‘let's do it today’ reality.

3.It empties out my head. I don’t have to carry around all those ideas like a big black scribble inside my head anymore – or have little lists on scraps of paper all over the house like I used to. In fact, I sometimes joke that this board is the contents of my head.

Oh, and just in case you're wondering what 'lock-hopping' is, it's a half-baked idea that came to me while sitting by a canal lock one sunny day. 

Lock-hopping: Hitching a ride on a canal boat at a lock, changing boat every time you get to the next lock. The aim is to see how far you can get and to meet and talk to as many people as possible.