One Year in the Making, Our Frames are Finally Done

Once our frames were all built, it was time to get them painted, ready to be installed and then actually install them

Before we painted we worked on patching the slight imperfections in the corners

We used wood filler to fill the gaps. Chris used a small putty knife on the face of the frames

And I went around and applied it to the outside edges with my fingers

We left them alone for a couple of hours and then went back to sand them. Chris used the orbital sander to sand the faces 

Then we went around and sanded the edges by hand

After that, we were finally ready for paint, yay! It was such a nice day when we were working on them that I took them all outside to enjoy the sunshine while I painted all 10

Because our primer is water based, after the first coat the grain was raised a bit so we sanded again to make things smooth. This revealed a bit of the bare wood in some places so I painted a second coat of primer over everything

Happy preggo painter

After everything got 2 coats of primer and 2 color coats (white water/oil hybrid) we brought everything inside. A day or two went by to really let everything set up and we got ready to prep them for hanging. You can put a number of brackets on the back of artwork to hang them, but Chris wanted to get fancy and use his plunge router to cut a key hole slot to hang them

We got the router set up with the track to make sure it was routering out a slot on the back in an even line and clamped everything down

Chris cut the first one and when we lifted it off the table we noticed some scuff marks, doh!

The simple solution was just putting down some paper to protect each frame as they sat face down on the table

Then Chris set up a jig to make sure that each key hole was getting cut at the exact same size

The black stop on the right was the starting point, and the piece of wood drilled down was the stop on the left. Then Chris plowed through and cut for the key hole in the remaining 9

In the evening we brought all the materials inside, finally ready to put all the frames and posters together

I set in each piece of glass and cleaned it before I set the poster inside. After I let it fully dry I dropped the poster in, put the piece of cardboard on top and then gave it to Chris to finish off. He used this handy tool (I can't remember the name) specifically designed to insert points into the edges of the frame to hold in your artwork

Then he gave it back to me, I cleaned off the front and we had a pretty picture frame

We worked like that for about an hour

And then we had all 10 frames done and ready to hang! I played around with the placement of them to see which posters we liked together and where we wanted them to go. These 4 will go on the wall next to the front door

And these 6...

...will go on this wall

At first I wanted them vertically aligned (2 wide, 3 tall) like how our national park posters are in the front room. But this is our "family room" so Cashew will play in here a lot so we decided aligning them horizontally was probably a better idea for safety and so her (eventual) toys don't block the beautiful artwork :)

Now we just have to hang them and the room is DONE!