Makes Me Happy: Love Notes

>>Welcome to Makes Me Happy Wednesdays. A photo. A caption. Just a little something for which I am grateful.

Play Date Treats

Chocolate Milk — served in sprinkle-rimmed glass (honey makes the sprinkles stick)

Simple Fruit Salad — served in a glass pedestal bowl.

Sandwich Cookie — stuffed with fresh raspberries and maple cream cheese spread

LEGO Wall!

A LEGO wall of our very own. This project has been on my mind since I posted about one like it on Apartment Therapy a couple of years ago. It wasn't hard to get the kid or the Hubs on side. We did a little research and this is the way we decided to go about it.

We picked the colour. With much debate. I wanted grey. But those panels are bigger and more expensive per square inch. But I REALLY didn't want the green. I couldn't bear the green. So, we went with blue.

We picked the wall with the least amount of surface area. Because LEGO is expensive! We ordered our 60 panels online as it turns out that our local LEGO store has a policy of selling a maximum of 5 pieces at any one time.

Hubs screwed in hardboard into the studs. Then he unscrewed them all. Because he realized that gluing them onto the wall before screwing them in would give them that extra bit of stability that would be so important when you are pulling LEGO pieces off the wall. Nobody wants the wall to give way when you tug at it. So he added some adhesive and screwed them back in. There were a couple of heavy sighs and an eye roll or two but in the end it was deemed well worth it.

Since each plate has rounded corners you can see a tiny gap where they join up. We decided to paint in behind where the base plates would meet up. We got some matched paint that worked great. And then we practiced by putting up the base plates temporarily with masking tape.

We also painted a frame around the wall as we weren't sure if we wanted to have to cut a whack of base plates to make them reach from wall to wall. In the end, it's very easy to cut them it turns out, with just a standard industrial cutter and a metal straight edge. We may end up buying a few more base plates to finish off around the edges of the wall.

Next, it was time for tiling. Spud was very helpful in getting each base plate out of its package. Hubs cut the few tiles we had to. Hubs and Spud took turns sanding the backside of each one.

Then it was glueing time.

Note that LEGO pieces themselves work brilliantly at holding it all in place for the 24 hour curing time required for the glue to dry.

Here are some close ups of the little collaborative mosaic-like project we worked on as a family this weekend. It was inspired by a little friend who thoughtfully brought Spud a "room warming" present full of little, unique LEGO bricks. It was a really fun project to work on together. It's terribly addictive in fact — my fingers are SO sore from prying apart so many little pieces. But we enjoyed the process and we are all a little proud of the way it came out.