Magnetic Wood Holiday Board

Holiday Decoration April (6)

I LOVE Holidays! I LOVE decorating!  I LOVE making things out of wood!  And I LOVE changing things up!  So ever since I saw this tutorial a couple of years ago, I have wanted to make one.  I finally had the time (and my own saw) to make it.  I followed the tutorial but with a few changes.

Instead of using one large piece of bead board, I found bead board slats and cut them to the length I wanted and then glued them together.  I did not do this as perfectly as I would have liked and now that I have done it once, I could do it much better a second time around.  But lets be honest.  I never get around to a second time, I always move on to the next project.   So it is good enough.

I also couldn’t find any roof flashings, which is what the tutorial uses for the metal magnetic part.  I don’t even know what they are.  And neither did the lovely people that work at Home Depot.  Every Home Depot employee I asked stared back at me blank faced. So instead I wandered around the store with a magnet looking for flat pieces of square metal.  I found one that was 12″ square, but I have no idea what it is actually for.  It was in the back of the store around the metal plate things that go over your heating vents.  Whatever those are called.  Anyway, I liked the nice even edges and I know from experience that cutting metal with perfectly nice straight edges is impossible, so I decided to keep it that size.  Which meant I decided to make bigger, more elaborate holiday pieces.  To cover more area.  No teeny tiny decoration on a huge piece of metal for me please.  Which means that I turned a 2 day project into a 2 week project.  Yay!  As Vu would attest, this is pretty much how every project of mine goes.  Why would I want to make things simple or easy?  Come on.  But I love the process and the result, so it works for me.  Even if Vu says we will never pay someone how much it would cost me (in time spent) to make it.  Which is also why Vu’s dream of retiring early to run my craft business will never come to fruition.

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House Building GIF

We bought our house in the beginning of April of 2013, but then had to wait for them to build it.  Those 9 months seemed to last forever.  They started construction at the end of July and I would go up after work as often as possible to watch the progress.  We were very anxious for it to be finished and I was excited to watch it go up.  It was a very happy day in the middle of December when it was finally finished and we were able to move in.  We have loved living here so much, we feel so blessed to call it our home.  We have also really enjoyed furnishing and decorating and getting settled in.  Vu in particular LOVES his “man cave” and it did turn out pretty awesome, even if he has to put his work office in the closet.  We have also learned a lot about being home owners, this being our first time.  There are a lot of things that we had never thought about before.  In case any one is wondering you have to connect the water line before you can run the dishwasher.  It works much better that way.

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I put together a GIF with the pictures I took as they build it.  I love seeing the changes in the seasons and especially the tree out front as the leaves change color and fall.  For some reason the quality of the pictures decreased in the GIF but I had a really hard time getting it to save at all, so you know.  I am still very new at Photoshop so I was happy that it actually works, seeing as I am so great with technology… But I am learning.

House-Building-GIF

It snowed the week we moved in, I love seeing everything blanketed in white.

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