A Royal Time

This blog comes packed with two brief introductory paragraphs!:

1) Sometimes, Kelsey and I are bad at stuff. Usually not big things...we're good at big things. We planned a wedding (technically Kelsey did that), we successfully moved to a different town, we obtained gainful employment, etc, etc, etc. It's the little things Kelsey and I are bad at sometimes...the keeping up with laundry, the taking something to the post office promptly, the making the bed, etc, etc, etc.

2) Kelsey bought me the coolest Christmas present ever. Last year we worked to finish our basement. Our basement is now finished. The walls in our now finished basement are very bare. Kelsey bought me very excellent prints from an art gallery dedicated to Wes Anderson. Wes Anderson is my favorite movie director. He's directed Royal Tenenbaums (the best movie of all time) and Rushmore and four other movies that are all great. I could review all of them for you, but Kelsey assured me no one wants to read a long blog post with six movie reviews for films only 5% of the general population find entertaining. Noted. Lucky for everyone your enjoyment of Wes Anderson films will have nothing to do with your enjoyment of this blog.

Sometimes I hang out with characters from Wes Anderson movies...and the Amish? Who is that guy?

Okay, now that introductions are out of the way: I got very excited when I opened Kelsey's present. I loved each print. She bought me six prints. Five of them were a set. Then she bought an extra Royal Tenenbaums print because, as mentioned, it is the best movie ever. It was the perfect gift. But in the back of my head a thought grew. It was a dark thought. It was: I will never hang these pictures. These pictures will sit in the basement. They will get dusty. I will keep saying, "I'll hang them tomorrow." Then tomorrow I will say, "I'll hang them next tomorrow."

This is the bar, pre-print. The Cat in the Hat looks hurt.

That's the thing about tomorrows--there is always one coming up the next day. I made a promise to myself. I would not ignore this little thing. I would not make this a moehill*. 

*Marriages tend to develop a secret language unique to themselves. The comfort that wraps around a relationship allows for an evolution of speak. One of our reoccurring words is moehill, derived from when Kelsey once told me not to make a mountain out of a moehill. I asked her if she meant molehill. She said that made no sense and insisted the expression was moehill. Because moehill made sense? And now the small things we are occasionally real bad at become our moehills when spoken about aloud. We use it to playfully remind the other when something one of us said we'd do isn't getting done--clean a bathroom, do the dishes, vacuum. "Um, you're letting the dishes become a moehill."

Last night, with nothing else to do, I realized there was no better time to hang up my Wes Anderson prints.

The first thing I had to do was put hooks on all of the frames, so they could be hung. Why don't frames come with hooks? Are they even called hooks--those little jagged metal teeth?  Shouldn't a frame inherently be able to be hung without further meddling? Yes.

Dottie is scared of luggage and some forms of plastic but not hammers, nails, or power tools.

The second thing I had to do was figure out how to actually secure the hooks on the frames since the nails that I needed to use were less than half an inch long. They were nano-nails. After several attempts at nailing in the smallest nails ever created, I resigned myself to the fact I would have to hold them between two of my fingers and smash both the nails and my fingers at the same time. In hindsight I should have used needle-nosed pliers, but I was already lying down on the floor when I started hammering and didn't have the pliers next to me. You understand.

Stupid nano-nails. Who invented you anyway?

The third thing I did was measure out where to hang the pictures. Do you want precise measurements? Of course you do. We put an inch and a half gap between every picture, leaving four inches on each side of the wall. We also lowered the second and fourth pictures by an inch. The frames themselves are seventeen and a half inches wide. I'm sorry, I don't know the height of the pictures. I used a tape-measurer to make the measurements. I could have used a ruler I suppose or a yardstick. The wall itself is about ninety-three inches long. Using a pen, I put a mark where I planned to nail a nail.

Evidently I'm balding from behind? Luckily baby got back.

The fourth thing I did was nail actual human size nails into the areas I'd marked on the wall. I did this by holding a nail against the wall in one hand, putting a hammer in my other hand, lifting my hand holding the hammer, and then lightly tapping the hammer against the nail until I had the nail the desired distance into the wall.

The fifth thing I did was hang the frames I'd previously put hooks on by placing the hooks I'd previously put on the frames onto the nails I'd previously put in the wall with the hammer I'd previously held.

One more pic of me...for the ladies.

And wah-la! I now have the coolest bar ever.

Art is neato.

It was difficult to properly photograph. That said, the splendor is there.

If you want better pictures of the awesome prints, visit this website here. If you are interested in obtaining your own awesome Wes Anderson prints, visit this website here.  If you would like to see Wes Anderson's movies, visit this website here and sign up for a membership, add the appropriate movies to your queue, and wait patiently for the United States Postal Service.

This whole project took a little over an hour. The time was entirely taken up by the nano-nails. It was the sort of project that can easily be put off for no good reason because it seems like a bigger undertaking than it really is. I'm not sure why these projects seem so hard sometimes. It's probably because there are always so many of these "little projects" out there waiting to be done. That said, a project (or two) a week is completely reasonable and it (they) are well worth doing.