Weekend Project

Full disclosure: this did not actually happen in just one weekend. Why? I had to run all over the place to find the right materials for it.

Nonetheless, I am right chuffed I finally finished it today!

This is what it looked like to start with: It's not a completely unfortunate looking piece but it needed perking up after more than three decades of use.

I want to blame the blurring on the camera but it was a combination of my unsteady hand at that time--can't remember why--and possibly a little bit of that pregnancy blurry vision thing. Maybe. Either way, you can see that the cork has so many pock marks it barely holds any type of pin now, and if you look closely at the bottom right of the image, the cork has started lifting up at the edge.

The frame itself is fine though slightly beaten up but I like that look. The "impt. trivia" header, which has always struck me as funny, needed sprucing up too. It doesn't look that bad in the photo but if you look at the rainbow, you can barely tell the pink from the yellow and while the white is still obviously white, it's no longer as eye-catching as it might have been once.

This is the rear of the area where you see the cork lifting. It's suffered water damage and the plywood has already warped up a great deal. I didn't know this was the case until I started dusting the whole thing off in preparation for stripping off the old cork.

Undaunted, I asked the handymen we hired to restore our roof if they could spare a little bit of plywood for my project. I don't have photos but they very kindly measured it out and sawed off the plywood for me, not to mention reassembled everything.

I sadly do not have photos but it's not hard to imagine this thing stripped of its signature cork.

Just saying.



Above is the side by side of the difference a few coats of paint makes. I'd stuck on the first layer of cork then as you can see, but I decided it was too thin and the line breaks didn't look nice.

My goal here was to refresh the paint but not make it look brand new. I think I succeeded nicely, don't you?

After two weeks of waiting, I finally found a large, thick sheet of cork to place on the bulletin board. Believe me when I say I was very close to purchasing chalkboard paint instead and just refinish the entire thing.

I measured out and cut the cork to the right size. It took a little bit of elbow grease in that I didn't want to cut the cork and realise I got the measurements wrong.

The final product? See below.

The acrylic paint I used to refresh the design was sealed using matte acrylic varnish and both the original sheet of new cork and this final piece of cork, were glued on using contact cement--copious amounts of it--to ensure a strong hold.

Here's to more projects!