The wall pictures we do have consists of: a badly self framed Justin Bua picture above the mantel (doesn't really suit us but better than what Dave had originally which was the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a favorite among Red Robin walls), store bought photos (some hung upside down or the wrong way to fit the frame), a tiger picture (which I liked until I recognized that it looked familiar to an Ed Hardy design), Dave's school certificates and a fertility fish painting (which is promptly coming down and being stuffed in the closet away from my ovaries). We had no photos of us hung anywhere.
A lot has happened since I moved into Fort McRoberts 2 years ago. We got married, had 2 kids and have another on the way. However no where was this reflected in our house, unless you count the toys that I always seem to be stepping on. It's not that we don't have pictures. We have over 1000 wedding photos, 2 professional photoshoots of Lily, Gigabytes of vacation photos and enough personally taken photos of Lily to even bore my parents. Usually I just look through them, take the ones I like, post them on Facebook then promptly forget about them. Photo Albums? Yes I have tons of them. They are all empty.
The lack of photos has bugged me for a while now, but I'm afflicted by the lazy gene-not having photos on the wall doesn't really effect my quality of life, and I can pretend I don't actually live in this dump, I'm just doing community service for this poor family with bad taste. However enough is enough, I decided in 2012 I would remedy this situation (I was kinda planning on the world ending before I had to actually do the grunt work, but its now March, so here I am). For Christmas this year I wanted one thing: a photo collage of my family. I got one from my mom and it came with four different frames, each frame had six photo slots. The frames could either be used alone or interlocked. It was beautifully done-the family in it looked so happy and put together. As lovely as it was, I decided that maybe I should have pictures of my own family in it instead of the sample shots of "random perfect family whom probably drive a smart car and not a BAT". Sensing that putting this together would be work and me being me-unless I'm tripping over it I tend not to deal with it-the frames sat in my parent's office until February. I kept coming up with excuses like: I was waiting for Lily's 1year photoshoot, I'm still in the planning phase and "the sample family sorta resembles us" (minus the white trash part). Anyways my mom finally put her foot down and made me order the photos of Lily and Elijah I wanted and then physically put them in the frame for me. We were down 2/4 frames. New baby of course was getting the third frame and the fourth one was going to our wedding photos or as Dave wanted: the cat (I know we "adopted" him but do I really have to pretend to be his mom?).
So now, bring in the husband. So far I had left Dave out of this process because I knew what I could do in an afternoon, team McRoberts could do in a month. For some reason Dave tends to complicate things, I think it's because he wants everything perfect-as it is he has already detected my shoddy craftsmanship cropping and cutting of the frames already done. However, I do not know how to hang a photo and anything involving me taking a hammer to our cheap apartment's wall doesn't sound like a good idea. I'd either crack the drywall or put a large hole in the wall and if either happen I'd just keep going until our 2 bedroom place was a one bedroom. Dave wanted to put all four up at once because then we could interlock it and only do the job once. He spent 5 hours-one and a half of them included going to Canadian Tire for brackets to connect the frames (and probably to get away from me and our late night arts and crafts project). Our four frames is now one big heavy one and a potential earthquake hazard.
Now since I cannot look at our half completed job I then made Dave look through all 1000 of our wedding shots. Culling 1000 photos to only 6 is hard enough, getting 6 that you actually agree on is near impossible. We survived but if it took another hour we would be putting up crime scene photos instead. All I needed was his input so I could order them and get the frame done as much as possible before the end of the next week, otherwise knowing us it would never be completed.
The wedding photos finally came today, so I decided to add them to the frame while Dave was at work. It was probably a better idea waiting, but as I mentioned above, adding Dave sometimes complicates the matter. Plus I didn't want to be debating with him how I cut crooked or how I should have zoomed in the photo and edited it before ordering it. Seriously he is such a perfectionist and I really don't want to be up until 3am with a slide ruler to make sure everything's even.
So when I got home I lifted the massive frame down, careful not to drop it. The whole thing is held together with a few brackets so one wrong move and it would snap making us have to repeat the whole process again. I threw our wedding photos, ignoring every good rule of scrapbooking. Really? It's on the wall, you wouldn't notice any issues unless you put your nose right up to the frame. One of Dave's brackets was covering the insert to get the backing off one of the frames. Since Lily is asleep and all of Dave's tools were in her bedroom closet, the logical thing would ahve been to wait until morning. However I was in it too deep. I pulled and tried to get the backing out with a knife. You can probaly guess what happened. Yup, I put an inch crack in one of the glass tiles. I'm not going to say which one because I'm hopping that Dave won't notice and I don't really want to rat myself out if he ever reads the blog. These frames are from costco, so I could technically back over them with the BAT and they wouldn't even blink an eye and replace it, however that would take so much time to disassemble, take back, get a new one, start over and con Dave into putting it back together again. I may go pick up a cheap 4x6 frame and steal the glass from that. I also decided to add baby #3's ultrasound photos since now it was a side by side comparison of the sample photo family and us, and the samples were winning both on functionality, cuteness and perfection. Anyways I will have to get a screw driver and remove that bracket so I can add the last two photos, but I think I'll have to wait until Dave is at work again before I'll attempt it....
So now my collage is done-well so close to being done. I just have to repeat the hellish task of taking it down and putting baby #3's pictures in once it is born. The only thing it needs is a clock or some inscription like Family, or a clock to fill the space in the middle. It's the gift that keeps on giving. So I really hope I hung it back on the hanger correctly and it doesn't impale the cat during the night tonight.
Did I mention that progress encourages more progress? We also hung up some photos to replace the upside down store stock ones. We put up three couple pictures of us while I was pregnant with each child. I call it balloon art because you can compare how big my ass ballooned up with each pregnancy.
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| The finished product of hours of frustrated and attempted creativity |
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