Poster Post!

Hello, long time no hear from me!  We have been super busy, and then went on vacation: We had a blast on our loooong road trip to Washington DC and many points in between. We clocked almost 4,000 miles on the car.  A lot of driving but a great vacation was had. 

-Trip #1 Highlight: The white beaches, sparkling water and pelicans of the Florida panhandle.  Glad we were able to go before the catastrophic oil spill kills it all.

-The Biggest Drag: The vomit stench that permeates the New Orleans French Quarter. Gross.

And even though I have been incommnicado does NOT mean we haven't been busy with more house projects.  Here is one of our latest.

Our recently redone office is still a work in progess.  We painted the office an almost black super-dark gray color called Sled by Behr. The east wall looked like a boring blank chalkboard and needed some sprucing up.  Dan had the brilliant idea of putting up a bunch of his movie posters.  Since Dan has been in "the movie business" for a million years he has quite a collection of some pretty cool ones.  These have been stored in various poster tubes and boxes for a long time but we decided to release them from captivity.  Really, what's the point of having neat stuff if it's not going to be out where we can see just how neat it all is? 

Dan ordered 3 poster cases from displays2go.com for around 40 clams each.  But, with all the posters already in our possession (free!), and the ease these frames offer in changing out one poster for another on a whim,  this is a great deal.  We have a permanent-yet-changeable wall of art on the east office wall that adds lots of color and style to the room.

To install them we first simply held up the poster frames and eyeballed how they should be spaced.  All 3 frames are the same size and we decided symmetrical spacing was the way to go. 

We measured the walls, did a little math, and marked with painters tape where the screw holes would be.  And we leveled!  Leveling is important, especially when hanging a group of like items, so they don't look weird and cockeyed.  Then we drilled holes through the thick plastic backs of the frames and the wall at the same time. 

Since the drilled holes were not necessarily going into the studs we used yellow plastic expansion anchors for our screws .  If you have ever put a screw or a nail in a wall, hung a picture from it only to have it come crashing to the ground  and leaving a hole in your wall you need expansion anchors!   I have learned the hard way and  I never hang anything on a wall without using these amazing devices.  They will save you a lot of time and swearing.  Drill the hole using a drill bit just big enough to snuggly insert the anchor, then screw (verb) in the screw (noun).  Really easy.  Below is a picture of Dan poking a plastic anchor into one of the drilled holes.

Fifteen screws later we had our new movie poster frames up and ready.  The frames actually flip open so it's super easy to access them.  Next, the fun part: Picking what posters to display first. Dan pulled out his sizable collection that we hadn't looked at for a few years.

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Woman Chaser.  I love Patrick Warburton, even when he played The Tick!  I love all the colors in this poster. This was our first pick.

Then, the classic Touch Of Evil, a great black and white photo with big daddy Orson Welles staring at you.  The red and yellow lettering is a nice touch.

And our third pick was this poster for the Japanese movie we think is called "The Horrifying Prophecies Of Nostradamus".  A search for this movie didn't give me much info.....but the poster is really great!  We do not speak or write Japanese!

And here is a photo of the poster frames, all done and looking good...except for the glare on Orson's face!  I'm happy with the result, and we can change out the posters whenever we want!