Project Complete - Framed TV

The hanging, framed TV is here!


A couple holes in the walls for the wires to be fished through, and this project is done! I’m super excited, I wanted that TV up and gone off the floor space.

It’s only been a couple months, but it feels like we’ve been planning it forever. Jesse and I saw the awesome old frame in a Pacifica junk shop during Fog Fest, couple months ago, and thought it might be cool to frame our TV. Then we went to Aaron Brothers, got told it would be about $500-700 to get a frame about 30x40, got butthurt, and went back to Pacifica's Debbie's Attic. $50 dollars later, the Frame was had.

The wall got painted an Golden Nugget Yellow. The TV bracket got ordered from Amazon ($27!) Surprisingly, it got stellar reviews, so I’m hoping it won’t just fold in anytime soon, leaving a pile of plasma TV behind.

I negotiated a TV position 3” higher than Jesse wanted it. Actually, a LOT higher than Jesse wanted it. I had a girlfriend over to take notes for when she goes to hang her TV, and further my cause, if need be, but she sided with Jesse on the whole TV height deal. They both lost. My contention was that it would look stupid at knee level or wherever he thought it’d be ideal, and he didn’t want to spend money in chiropractor bills from craning his neck. 3” accidental inches later, a deal was struck. By sheer luck, he measured wrong (this type of sheer luck happens often for him, HA!) and the TV is up where I like it. Something about not wanting to take 8 bolts out of studs. Score!

I view it as more of a pretty frame on the wall, so I’m not really concerned with “optimal viewing angles” and whatever other rubbish he was babbling about. But he does the actual watching of the TV, so I couldn’t hoist it up by the ceiling like I’d have liked.



Jesse got every swatch of purple color imaginable, and when I had a complete retinal overload, he just picked. He’s a lot better at picking out things that make sense, as opposed to veering towards the brightest, most sensory obnoxious option available, so the purple we ended up with I love. It looks good with yellow, and it seems to be the same red/purple colour family of the Danish Chair cushions, which pleases me.
I guess with only 2” showing you can’t really go wrong anyway, but now I have ¾ of a can of a brilliant purple color that’s making Jesse nervous. (Bathroom? Hallway wall? Stripes? Background for Golden Nugget comet tails? The possibilities!) From now on, I think we need only pick out the swatches of the most basic in house brand paint offered. Then, if there's r e a l l y nothing that strikes my fancy, we can proceed to the 7 million shades Benjamin Moore offers.



The inside of the frame got marked, and painted 4 layers of purple.

Layer 1 was pretty unimpressive:


Layer 2 was still weak:


Then it got all types of better:



Oddly, if you look closely, it needs another coat, but barely 2.5” are visible top and bottom, and it was midnight at that point. It came out to a really nice purple:



The 35lb frame got hoisted on two enormous 75lb anchors, into studs (WIN!); the TV got hung in middle.



I am really pleased with the profile, I thought it would stick out a lot further. The Cheetah Wall Mount had 1.9 profile, according to the specs, the frame is ~3" thick. The purple hides all the bracket nonsense, what little of it you might spot from the side.


Jesse’s currently wandering Ace Hardware looking for tools to make holes in drywall for wires. (My idea of punching it with a fist didn’t fly. I had others, involving screwdriver and a hammer, and butter knife and a heavy shoe, but never even got to voice them)

The semi finished product, as viewed from the couch (chiropractor nothing,) and imagine the wires hidden inside the wall:



We still need somewhere to stack all the DVD, Wii, and related fluff. I found an awesome bookshelf type thing on Craigslist, but Jesse vetoed. Too big, he said. Phhhth says I. But the search goes on.

UPDATE

Jesse made holes in wall, and wires are now hidden. The holes look better than if he had let me take a screwdriver and hammer to them:



The finished product:




I also discovered that we can hook up our laptop to the TV, and Google Pictures Screen Saver. I can have the TV play music and show me pictures of me, ALL day EVERY day.

Loony Bin Yellow aka Good Bye Deposit

We long wanted, (I did and talked Jesse into) and finally decided on a colour to paint the living room wall. The TV has to go up on it (I'm still pushing for framing it in some awesome old frame and painting some crazy colour inside, but, we'll see how I fare in negotiations). I even remembered an awesome frame at a place called Debbie's Attic (affectionately Debbie's Dumpster) in Northern California, and sent my stepmom who lives near there to take a picture/ dimensions. I'm nothing if not dedicated.


The frame turned out to be an unexpected, giant 41" x 51", (the TV is 26.5 x 40) but I'm picturing it very small, blended in, and inobtrusive like on a 160" wall. No, really.

Anyway, Jesse brought home all the ridiculously cute little swatches (I wanted at least 4 colours and all the 9 available shades of purple) and after 3 day deliberation we decided on Golden Nugget, a warm orangy yellow, regarldess of how obnoxious the monitor shows it:

I thought it would go well with the gold in the Green Curtains, the yellow in the Mini Couch, and when I finally get to sewing purple pink cushions for the Danish Armchairs, they'd look brilliant against it. I tried very hard to also work in a royal purple somewhere in the room, but got shut down. Jesse 1, Julia 0.

I had a mild panic attack when we got to Ace Hardware, complete with hallucinogenic in-brain flashbacks of the colour wheel, and decided the wall had to be a salmon pink, to complement the Green Curtain Wall.
Salmon Pink - vetoed. Jesse 2, Julia 0.

Then there was a cold feet episode, as I tried to make out of Ace with 3 jars of sample paints, none of which were Golden Nugget, and yanked at Jesse to go "paint stripes on the wall". Luckily, he largely ignored me, and walked out of Ace with a Benjamin Moore Egg Shell Base Golden Nugget Paint bucket and rollers.
One Sunday afternoon later:

The "Before":

The "Now":

We slapped on the 2 manufacturer suggested coats, and went out to JoAnn's to track down Simplicity 8125 Pattern I read about on Chronically Uncool Blog. And Barnes and Noble to look at quilt books (it'll probably never happen but I like to plan). I called my mother to update her on the 'rentmodeling' "Oh, like psych ward walls?".
No. Like sunflowers. Like sunflowers on the Mini Couch I have, and like pure, sunny, rainbowy, beachy happiness, despite what Dostoyevsky and whoever else wrote. Pffffth. I'll make my own symbolism.

"I feel like I ought paint a black line and spell out "Orange County Unified School District" was Jesse's first impression.

"Holy pumpkin sht", Was mine. I went fetched a pumpkin from kitchen to compare and indulge myself fully in the horror, but it was anticlimactic:

I's beginning to come to terms with it, although I'm sort of hoping the TV and whatever artwork I throw at it blocks quite a bit of the yellowness. Jesse is pretty pleased with it, which is also suspicious.

Now, I'm negotiating the possibility of glitter gold paint inside the Old Frame space behind the TV (Who cares, it'll only be a few inches, you'd think I was trying to paint his bathroom hot pink. Twitchy critter.) I didn't even know there WAS such a thing as Glitter Gold Paint (Thanks, H!!) And it makes me feel sad I didn't explore the "painting techniques" before this wall. But, wait - I'm all over the dining room wall. I'm thinking wine red, with black sand mixed in, and possibly still, the glitter gold. I'm picturing an epic triumph of astoundingly beautiful, faint inducing, albeit deposit sacrificing home decor. I would also like to use the remainder of the yellow paint to paint "swirls" on the opposite/hallway wall. No dice so far.

The almost put back together living room - with Green Curtain, Almost Upholstered Danish Chair in Perfect Pink or Purple, and the TV that started this whole thing to begin with:

In a related story, and while Jesse is furiously measuring (yes, in inches) the distances between armchairs, wall and armchairs, the TV and armchairs, to mathematically try bring sense back to this room, I think my next project will be copy-painting this painting I saw in a gallery during October trip to Chicago:
I can practically hear the crazy yellow wall call for it.

For now, the Wall is housing an unfinished Pond/Cattail Village and Paint copied Julie Hensley Adams' Sleepy Chick With SeaShells by Window paintings. (Painting idea and the original are hers, the copy cat execution and naming all me) Picture the TV up a yard and floating in an awesome old frame. With glitter inside.

Too much?

Antiquey Chalkboards and Rasterbating

I picked up a few old frames for I found in an attic of a garage sale, and came to find out they are all non-standard-canvas size, when I got home. FML.




I paint on and off, and I find that frames make my painting look a lot less like bored- hour- at- the- 8th- grade- art- class, and more like hello- art- institute. So now I carry a measuring tape with me everywhere where an 18 x 24 frame might lurk; meanwhile, I had four frames that fit nothing. I thought briefly about adding “Making My Own Canvas” to the List, but I don’t trust myself to cut 45’ corners. Or stretching canvas well. Or tucking corners. Or, really, anything that has anything to do with canvas stretching. I hear it is cheap and easy. But so is making your own bread, and I ain't kneading my own bagels anytime soon. Instead, I decided to happen upon some thick backboard at Home Depot, and cut it into the given frame sizes. I was going to paint on these, but just then Jesse’s appalling lack of Russian vocabulary surfaced, and I decided to make two of them into chalkboards. Jesse got chalkboard paint, and painted the backboard.

Kitchen chalkboard of verbs (also doubles as grocery 'want' list)




The bedroom study corner


It looks awesome. It would prbably be better if my closet looked organized and Jesse didn't sound out lyrics from various obscene Russian songs on the board (Seryoga), but I guess it's in Russian, so only few people would find it offensive.

To get a really smooth coat, I’d probably need to sand it with 000 sandpaper, re coat, and rinse, repeat. But it works pretty well as is, so I’ve got one in the kitchen, and one in bedroom. That way, next time Jesse claims he doesn’t know how to say “already” in Russian, I can sigh theatrically and point to the board. Of course, right after I did this, I saw a Pottery Barn chalkboard at a garage sale, *just* like I wanted, but I was already pleased with mine. The remaining frames are currently hanging in the study, empty. One of these days, I’ll paint some sunflowers, and a kissy picture on some backboard.

They are a little too big, but I would love to do something like this (the wall art, not the entire dining room):



On a smaller scale. There’s a rasterbator website' that takes an image you submit and returns a “restersized” version of it, which you can print on 8x8’s, or what have you. If I had another blank wall, I’d love to do something like that, probably with a boatload of cheap Ikea picture frames, and one of our camping trip photos. It can be as big as you want or as little as 2 frames. I’m a huge fan of this idea.

Meanwhile, I have three old but big frames left over (in the neighborhood 20x25), all different. I was thinking of doing a painting, in three parts. Kind of like this one I did a while back:



But split into three canvases. Well, backboards, in this case. The only down side to this, is that, of course, the three would have to stay together and require a large chunk of blank wall, which I don’t really have in our two bedroom. Nonetheless, I think I’ll add it to the List. At this point, couple more canvases and I’ll have to start either rotating my artwork, or nailing hooks to the outside of the building. SoCal good weather and all..