My Little Project

So I've had a project swimming around in my head for a while now, but I finally just decided to go for it. We've had a picture hanging over the couch ever since we moved in, and while it's a nice picture, it's not really super meaningful to us and it wasn't quite the right shape for that space. I've wanted to do a picture collage on that wall for a long time but I know frames can get expensive (even when buying on sale) and you know my kids aren't very cooperative when it comes to picture taking. After our little photo shoot last week I decided just to go full steam ahead with my project. We went to Hobby Lobby Friday morning and ended up not buying anything. I decided I could probably make it work with whatever I had on hand. I came home, took stock of what I already had, printed some pictures (with a coupon for 40 % off), and by Saturday afternoon I decided I was ready to start hanging.

I screwed the first screw into the wall and it went about halfway before getting stuck on something. I asked Marshall to help, and since he's stronger than me, he punched it in harder. And then we heard a pop, and could tell something was leaking. He unscrewed the screw and stream came blasting out of the hole in the wall along with a really loud spewing sound! To make a long (and frustrating) story short, we punctured the freon line to our upstairs unit. So we had to call the AC people (remember we just had our downstairs unit replaced this summer so we should have them on speed dial) and the on call guy came out to fix it. He had to cut a hole in our wall, patch the leak, and then recharge the system. All while we were trying to keep small children out of his way and watch football at the same time!

Once I start a project I like to see it finished quickly, so despite the fact that we have a hole in our wall and peeling paint from the freon leaking down the wall, I hung my pictures anyway! We will eventually fix the hole and repaint the whole room, but until then our wall will show some battle scars for a while. The ironic thing is that I was so proud of myself for making what we already had on hand work and not spending a lot of money. But in the end, my really inexpensive project ended up costing us over $500! Ahhhh! The joys of home ownership!

Here's a picture of the punctured line.

Our square hole in the wall. You can see the drip lines running all the way down the wall.

But here's what it looks like now!

A close up of our peeling paint. I'm just pretending that it adds character!