The garage is the only place in this house that I can really call mine!
Yeah, my husband has told the girls and I this particular fact more than once. So after the last time he got mad about the garage being left in disarray, my 7 (almost 8) year old said, "Let's make the garage really special for him!" So we started hatching plans. We figured we needed wall hangings, his favorite mascots and maybe some furniture.
Our first idea was a big sign proclaiming the garage to be Dad's. Here's the graphic I came up with:
I removed the "established date" from this picture in case someone wanted to use it. You can use this image or email me if you would like a higher resolution copy.
I started out with the idea of using an overhead projector to put the sign on the wall and painting it like a traditional mural. There were 2 problems though:
1. The garage needed a second coat of paint and I had no idea when that would happen
2. My 7 year old needed to help with the mural for a GS badge and I didn't figure she needed to be on a ladder.
So, how to create the sign inexpensively? I found white foam core at our local dollar store - 20x30 sheets. So I bought 3. Then I had to figure out how to get the design big enough and transferred over to the foam core. I used the website BlockPosters to enlarge my image to poster size. Then a friend suggested rubbing the back of the taped together poster with a dark colored chalk. Place the chalk-side down on the foam core and trace the design with a ballpoint pen, being careful not to puncture the paper/foam core.
[Now here is where I want to give you a hint. If you are using foam core, it probably has a paper coating that you'll actually be doing the painting on. In a garage, it may be exposed to moisture. It would be smart to paint a base coat of white paint (or whatever background color you choose) on the foam core BEFORE you transfer and paint the design. I learned this the hard way.]
Painting the sign was pretty standard. I started by outlining all the black areas so that my daughter could do the fill work, and theoretically not go outside the lines. I need to work with her on the concept of pulling the paint along instead of pushing it. So after she did the fill work, I went back and cleaned up the edges (sometimes more than once.) We then discovered that the checkered flag was too difficult to differentiate from the wrench, so I went back and painted the flag with gold paint. Here's the finished sign:
The next idea was to give my husband a little bit of functional furniture for the space. The garage really is a garage though. It has his tool bench, cupboards for storage, bike/toy storage and 2 cars in it. We weren't going to be able to find a couch for him. But he does have an old t.v. out there and on nice evenings we like to sit in the cross-breeze from the back and front yards while the kids play outside. So we thought we could give him a cool fold up table for beverages. I checked my local garage sale website and found someone with wooden t.v. tray tables. She gave me one for $3 because it had marker on it. We brought it home and painted the top black. Then we started arranging our bottle cap collection on it. We didn't have quite enough (a lot of the caps were used to make GS Christmas ornaments) so we added cool vintage Budweiser coasters and started gluing. As you can see, we are still a few caps short, but we are taking donations from friends and we'll have it full in no time. Then we will see what my husband wants to use to finish it, but I'm leaning towards self-leveling epoxy to make a nice hard finish.
The final step was adding his mascots. I had 6 metal trays that I thought would make cool wall hangings, all I had to do was come up with stencils for them. Without thought I was able to come up with the Chicago Bears, Jeff Gordon and the Nebraska Huskers. I found acceptable images and printed them off as big as I could get on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I could go into how to cut a stencil, but really, here's a great tutorial that will probably explain it better: Stencil Tutorial
My husband was okay with the first 3 signs but then he said, "what about the Oakland A's, the Atlanta Hawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins?" Okay, it was my fault for not thinking of the A's, but in the 12 years I've known this man, I've never heard him mention the Hawks or the Penguins. Oh well, whatever makes him happy. They turned out okay but the Huskers one is a second generation - I overcut the first and then gluing it down to paint with was nearly impossible - and the Penguins almost went flying across the room about 30 times before I got it done.
So that's the garage makeover. He likes it and we're pretty proud of ourselves.
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