Involved in a Cover Up

    Maybe I've been watching too much Scandal, but I couldn't help but get caught up in a cover-up operation myself.  Ok, so it was nothing crazy, but it was definitely time to address a huge eyesore in our condo that I had to see every time I walked into our master bedroom. 

     
    A huge breaker box was really not in the design, so we needed a plan to cover it up.  We may be a little behind the times, but we are still smitten with subway art here in this household.  Even though they were big back in 2011 and here we are two years later, I find that there is something so timeless about them, and I think that's really important when choosing art that you are going to see on a daily basis.  

    I searched Pinterest on a hunt for the best and simplest tutorial.  The one that suited our needs the best was found here by Lemonade Makin' Mama.  It basically involves building a wooden box and adhering a large blueprint style piece of paper to it.  We followed it almost to the letter, so I won't re-hash it here for you.  I do have a few notes and tips though: 

    First of all, Kevin is way better at formatting than I am.  I get really frustrated when I can't get something centered or words get cut off, so this job was relegated to him.  We chose some of our favorite neighborhoods or areas in Boston and a few different fonts and Kevin drafted this up in Word.  He fixed up the dimension settings before saving it as a PDF for submitting to Staples to print up for us.  

    I went along with the tutorial and used Elmer's Spray Adhesive to adhere the paper to the wood.  I'm glad that I did because I think Mod Podge would have caused a lot of unwanted rippling.  This step might be completely different should you choose to use a canvas as your base instead of building a wooden box.  In fact, that was my original plan.  I've seen some awesome tutorials for creating canvas style prints on Pinterest that would work equally as well I'm sure.  It just didn't work in our case because we needed a super custom size.

    Full disclosure, we didn't stay under $10 like the tutorial that we used.  Wood can be pricey!  But we did stay pretty close to the budget.  Also, I didn't have any Mod Podge of all things so I had to add that in as an expense.  It wasn't used in the tutorial that we followed, but I used the Matte Mod Podge to sort of seal my work afterwards.  It did cause some rippling which terrified me (starting over didn't sound like fun), but once the Mod Podge dried on the surface, I flipped the whole thing over to flatten out overnight and it worked like a charm!  Here it is before it was hung.

    

 

{A close-up of the distressing that I did.  I love that you can see the nailhead from the box construction through the paper.  That was a happy accident!}

 

    
    Kevin used some hooks above the breaker box to hang the wooden frame.  You can actually see them in the before pictures up top.  We needed to still be able to access the breaker box for obvious reasons so this hook system has offered easy access so far.

    Have you covered up an eyesore in your house recently?  
    Or better yet, did anyone watch the Scandal season finale last night?  I'm obsessed. 

    I will be linking this project to the following:

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