The Great Wall... of Pleasant Hill

The Great Wall, no, not THAT Great Wall, but rather the roughly 21' x 9' expanse in our living room.

Since we built this house 8 years ago, we've changed the decor of the main wall in our living room several times. 

At one point, we came up with an idea to use those stick-on wall words (I can't think of the name of that stuff for nuttin') to create a crossword puzzle of inspirational words. 

That was kinda cool but if we were truly thinking at the time we did it, we would have put them on 4" bathroom tiles to make it look more like a Scrabble game board, and by doing it that way, it would have been movable/reusable.  Sadly, it is now at the landfill.

Then Momma got an idea from Pinterest to build a frame with wires strung across the thing.  Then you would use clothes pins to hang pictures from it.

So, we procured some old wood siding boards from the house that Lesley's Grandpa Maynard had built/lived in, and did a similar project which you can sort of see in this photo of the oompa-loompa's after decorating their gingerbread houses:

I did nothing with the paint or texture of the boards.  I simply cut them to the length I wanted, used screw in loop-hooks on each side and used twine to string between them.  I sort of like it, but it didn't seem to "fit", for whatever reason.

So, what to do?

Again, from the lovely Pinterest site, Momma comes up with an idea to have shelves cover most of the walls.  

I'm sort of on board but it would cost many hundreds of clams to adorn the wall in shelving.  I don't want to spend that right now.

That left us with three options:
1.) Daddy builds and hangs the shelving
  or     
2.) Daddy builds and hangs the shelving
  or 
3.) Daddy builds and hangs the shelving


We ended up going with option 2, Daddy builds and hangs the shelving.

I figured I could have the boys help me a little to give them a little experience of that sort.  You know, POWER TOOLS!!

A few years back, Robby helped me build a new amp housing/speaker cabinet for a little cheapy amp in which I had blown the speaker.  We had a lot of fun and made a cheesy little amp sound pretty dang good.  

The frame of the cabinet.  Robby helped cut the wood using the miter saw for the first time.  He also helped with the sanding and filled all of the nail and screw holes for me.

Making progress...

The finished project with the exception of the speaker grill cover.

 
Back to the silly wall...

We finally settled on a shelf design called $10 shelves.  

I can assure you, unless you have an under-the-table wood connection, these shelves are NOT $10.  Closer to $30, but still much better than trying to buy something similar.

I had my worker elves help me until they got bored, which took roughly 20 minutes.  But it was still fun.  

Once the shelves were assembled, I had to move them from the garage to the storage room in the basement for painting as it was too cold outside yet.  Oh, and see that 5-gallon bucket behind Caleb?  There were 8 of them as I conducted an experiment this winter to see if I could grow potatoes indoors. You can, however, the first ones that I "planted", were rotten when I went to transfer them outside earlier this week, but the ones that I had "planted" only a month ago, were doing pretty good.  We'll see if they survived their transplant to wild outdoors soon enough...

The boys painted the first two and then decided that they needed a break... that meant that they had been talking and wanted to play Super Mario Bros instead.  I checked their work but they did pretty good getting everything covered and smooth.

And while they're hard to see since we painted them the same color as the wall (on purpose), there they are.  We need about 30 more pictures to fill them all up, but my part is done! 

And from a different angle...

So that's where we're at currently.  We both like it now but we both liked the crossword puzzle & picture frame clothes pins thingy-ma-bob as well.  

Again, we'll see...

And so goes the ever ongoing saga of the Great Wall... of Pleasant Hill.