We've Been Framed!

The family photos on our dining room wall are almost 4 years old, you can mostly see them in this photo.  Owen was only a year old, which was so long ago that he barely recognizes himself when he looks at the photos.  But regardless of how old they are, we love to look at them during dinner together each evening.  

A good friend of ours took new family photos for us a few months ago, I just hadn't had a chance to do anything with them until recently.  Walgreens, which is conveniently only 3 blocks from our house, was having a sale on their cardboard poster prints.  And since these were cardboard poster prints, I knew if we built our own frames, it would eliminate the need for glass in the frames.

I ordered an 11x14 of each of the kids and a 16x20 of our family picture.  Total price = $35.00.

I had two requirements for the frames we were going to build - chunky and free.  Kind of describes my childhood.  Brent had a bunch of solid cherry scraps in the garage so he started by cutting these four pieces.

I flipped everything over so you could see what the back looked like.  Those holes are the pocket holes we drilled out with our Kreg jig.

When it's time to actually run the screws in, we use this Kreg clamp to hold everything flush.  Never underestimate a good set of clamps.

Adding extra moldings to further chunk it up seemed like an obvious choice, so Brent added this border around the edges.

Normally I would give things a good sanding at this point, but I really wanted these frames to feel rustic and rough with lots of texture, since that sort of plays in with all of our other furnishings.  Rustic and rough also means your kids can further destroy it and it simply "adds character".  No fancy things for the Kruse's!  Anyway, I stained both frames with an American Walnut color.  

Here's where I got stuck - I couldn't decide if I was going to paint the whole thing turquoise and sand some off or if I was going to leave the frame with just the stain - so I went down the middle of the road and chose to leave that outside border stained and just added a thin coat of paint to the interior frame.

With a rougher grit sand paper, I quickly sanded a small amount off shortly after the paint had dried.  I followed up the rough grit with a finer grit to get more detail and I also sanded more roughly around the edges of the frame.

I showed that picture above to my mom and she recommended adding an additional strip of moulding around the inside, to frame out the poster a little bit more.  One of the many reasons I love my mom - because she was absolutely right and I hadn't thought of that!!!

This next photo is after they've received a coat of poly - because I thought that would make them easier to dust.  I'm laughing now, so is Brent and my mom probably, because we all know the probability of me dusting is extremely small.  Ok, so maybe the poly coat will make it easier for me to blow the dust off.

We still have one more frame to build, for the 16x20 poster but since the temperature is -10 degrees today, it's impossible for us to work in the garage so we are on to other projects.  Hopefully we can get the third one built in the next few days and then we're working on a way to hang them in the dining room, which may be a win or a fail - we'll see!