We got married...it was awesome. We bought a house in St. Louis and moved into it. Megan is pregnant and due in the next 17 days.
That's up to today in the short and sweet of it. Now, let's detail the present:
We have been working on Henry's room (baby's name by the way, Henry Orion Wall or Howie, Hank or Flipper for short...possibly Flip as well.) and it is progressing nicely.
Megan went to Lawrence one weekend which allowed me time to take down some horribleness and paint the room in the style we had discussed. It was a tremendous amount of work, but proved fruitful.
The crib got assembled, the carpet put down...now is the question of storage.
Of course, we have the dresser, we have the end table and these things will serve nicely as storage, but there are somethings that need to be displayed! You can't have your awesome books and collectible Fraggles just sitting in a closet!
So Megan and I bounced ideas back and forth for a long time. We started thinking about pegboard. How it would be an original use for the stuff. After thinking about it for a while, I decided I didn't want my nursery to look like a garage so we moved onto slatboard. Slatboard, for the uninitiated, is a type of hanging system that you see often in stores.
We thought about it, and even had a generous offer from John, Megan's father, to pay for the slat board, but it just wasn't quite right yet...something was missing.
I started researching magnets. Magnetic paint, rare earth magnets, steel panels, I looked into all of these. My plan was to embed rare earth magnets into pieces of 2x10's and somehow make the wall ferrous. By doing this, we could have shelves that could be moved around the wall on a whim! Pretty cool right?
Well it is.
The problem, however, is that magnetic paint does not have a high enough iron content to hold up a shelf, let alone the contents on the shelf. The best I could find was that with 6 coats of paint, it would hold maybe 6 pieces of paper. That would not work for this.
I looked into steel siding, steel panels, I even looked to see if you could buy Cadmium in sheets.
But this idea was not to be...not in this project at least. At some future date I would love to make a magnetic wall with shelves, but it'll have to wait.
So we were back to square one.
Then Megan started looking at art for the walls. What can we hang to take up some space?
Megan came across this bicycle tryptich hanging in someone's front hall and loved the idea!
So now the decision became, what to put on it? We are not bicycle enthusiasts so that was out. Megan suggested a camera. I like photography and it is a cool image...so I did some mock-ups.
While these are certainly interesting and pretty, I couldn't shake the feeling that it just wasn't right. I mean, I like taking pictures but it's not my livelihood. Architecture is.
Which spawned these!
The first image is Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, one of my favorites, and the second and third are sketches of the German Pavilion in Barcelona by the architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (my alltime favorite architect and building.)
But Megan thought these were too complicated, and especially was not fond of LMVDR's drawing of the female sculpture.
So what to do...finally we decided to emphasise Henry's hometown...what better image than the St. Louis skyline?
Now you may remember this drawing from a previous piece I did for Megan on our first anniversary:
Well that settled it! At least in my mind...I think I asked Megan, but I can't be sure. Anyway, it settled the question for me...and I carried forward.
But we still had the storage issue. Well that was when I had one of those moments that makes design so much fun...one of those eureka moments that all the tumblers fall into place and the lock turns easily.
Why don't we do the mural onto pegboard? Of course!!
Execution:
So I did a little research into transfers. I remember having a friend in grad school who had done transfers for his drawings and had used wintergreen oil. Essentially, he had xeroxed his drawings and using the wintergreen as a releasing agent, he had gotten the toner to jump from one drawing to another surface. How easy is that!
I read into all sorts of techniques: gesso transfers, caulk transfers, heat transfer, I finally decided that xlene transfer would be the best option. Xylene, the chemical found in older markers as a blending agent, works with any toner based printout (laser or xerox) and is generally used on wood, cloth or paper.
Well, here's the rub, I am transferring directly onto latex paint, and xylene, being more or less turpentine, will loosen the paint.
Oh well..where's the fun without experimentation!
So off to home depot...I bought the necessary materials and set to cutting the furring down. Of course, I don't have a miter saw, so I went the old fashioned way...
I have a new found respect for the Amish.
The mitered edges will look cleaner in the long run...and I do love clean looks.
So after I painted the panels that color blue we love so much, and let them dry, it's time to try the transfers.
I plotted the image of the skyline on my plotter at work after breaking it into three parts. Once the paper was arranged on the board it was time to begin the experimental transfer.
This is the nasty stuff that made me smell like a marker...
Well...the long and short of it is that it worked...it's not flawless, the xylene did pick up the paint a little bit, but I am satisfied. Let's hope Megan is too!
Well that's it so far...this weekend I will hang the board...I'll post more about that later.
And I promise to be better about posting more frequently. Every two years just ain't gonna cut it!
Lala
