Last night we got an interesting question from Shirley on Facebook:

Does anyone have any interesting and crafty ideas for me collecting “board” [rent] from my kids and marking it off weekly…I thought of an envelope with a calendar on it to mark off…but thats as far as I got.

I trolled Pinterest a bit for ideas, and thought these options looked pretty interesting.

You could create a custom clipboard using Wallies chalkboard stickers to record incoming payments. You could affix hooks at the bottom of the board and hang envelopes off of the bottom – one for each child. If you want, you could have a clipboard for each child and then arrange them in a pretty way on the wall.

Another Facebook reader suggested looking at Advent calendars, which I did. When I saw this clothespin-based one, I thought it could also be a neat way to collect the rent. All you would need is one pin for each week of the month. You would probably also want to have a chart or checklist above the pinboard to note payments due and received.

Here’s a pinboard with a string stapled on for clothespins

And another with binder clips on strings.

What do you think? Do you have any good ideas for Shirley?