Another Project Completed

I’d been putting off finishing the blackboard. But The Wife lit a fire under me and the job got done. The final hurdle was figuring out how to get such a big thing — it’s four feet by four feet — mounted on the wall. The solution we found was both elegant and affordable — shower hooks. They were exactly as wide as the frame and mounting on the blackboard, and once we found the studs in the wall to drill in to, they were easily strong enough to support the whole thing.

The board was warped (rarely is plywood perfectly flat, in my experience) so we had to mount two more hooks on the top side of the board, and we slid it in from the side. What we’ve done is to basically clip the board to the wall, pressing it flat.

Before The Wife drew her impressionistic vision of the Colosseum, the board was flat black. I thought that guests would look at it and say, “Wow, what kind of television is that?” if it were allowed to remain so. But once the chalk went on it, there is no mistaking what it is — or The Wife’s talent for getting just the right amount of ornamentation on. If she’d drawn much more than she had, it would have looked busy. If she’d drawn less than that, it would have looked silly.

Credit where it’s due: this was The Wife’s project, from start to finish. I assisted with the execution, doing much the actual assembly work, some of the painting, and some of the mounting. But The Wife was the brains behind the operation — she conceived the idea, outlined the way to get it done, and the way to get the thing put on the wall. She had a great idea and it really worked out nicely.

So that job’s done. Next on the handyman’s list will be fixing the sprinklers in the back yard to repair the “dead zone.”