The Gallery

Today we have a guest blogger... SWMBO.

After almost a decade of my dear husband (also known as Mr. SWMBO) writing this blog - I have been invited to made a guest entry.  This post is about a topic that is near and dear to my heart.  We are fortunate to have 2 great kids, our oldest in college and our youngest a senior in high school.  The empty nest is right around the corner for us now and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

In the course of starting to clean out the nest, we have been wondering what to do with years of accumulated kid artwork.  Any of you who are parents know how much we treasure these paintings, charcoals, crayon drawings etc. that come home nearly every day when the kids are young, and then taper off as they move through middle school into high school.  I figure we have accumulated somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 kids x 2 art pieces per week x 32 weeks a year in school x 10 years = 1,280 pieces of artwork!  Enough to fill a very large closet if not an entire room.

Each and every piece is precious, yet I knew we couldn't keep everything.  So we set to the task of picking 1-2 things from each year that either the kids loved or Mom loved.  I then had a vision of what to do with our kid's artwork curated collection - turn it into a gallery.

However, it would have cost thousands of dollars to custom frame all these pieces.  This is where he gets his kudos.  He was tasked with helping me frame some of the pieces using recycled frames from a local reuse store, spray mounting the rest of the pieces onto foam core, attaching adhesive mounting tape and finally hanging the entire gallery.  Given the layout of our Georgian Colonial house, we have a long hallway and back staircase on the second floor that is frankly quite blah.  Sure Mr. SWMBO painted it up a pretty color and restored the wood trim, but it was               b-o-r-i-n-g.

Now thanks to Mr. SWMBO and his patience we have turned the second floor hallway and back staircase into a colorful, whimsical artwork diary of our life.  Favorites include Matisse fish, The Mona Lisa, Warhol cows, Scooby Doo and Jim Dine hearts.  Now when we are missing the kids as they are off at college we can browse through our gallery and take a literal walk down memory lane.  Then I can go over to my now empty storage closet and buy some new outfits to fill it.  You knew shopping would make its way into my blog post somehow ;-)