Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

July 8, 2015 | By Sage |

Wedding DIY: Chalkboard Seating Sign

It’s hard to believe that Sam and I have been married for over a year. I told Sam I couldn’t believe how past the time has flown by, and he said it feels like it’s been forever. I guess I’m just that much fun to live with…

On our actual anniversary, we celebrated with a hike:

Well Sam wasn’t actually physically present since I was on the mother-daughter hiking trip I posted about Monday, but he was with us in spirit. And in a strange printed photo that I brought with me and posed with.

Then the next weekend we celebrated by visiting some of our favorite places in the neighborhoods where we lived before we got married, which was also around the time that we bought a house in a different part of Boston. Our biggest challenge in planning the day was that most of our favorite places involve eating, and there are only so many meals we’re capable of eating. But it was a lovely day and we’ll just have to go back soon to hit the rest of our favorites.

Anyway, I thought I’d take the occasion to share another wedding DIY project. We DIYed a lot for the wedding and I’ve written about some of the projects from time to time (past posts include one about our wedding generally, and another about our DIY invitations, escort cards, and guest favors). Today I’m talking about the chalkboard seating sign I made telling guests to sit wherever they wanted during the ceremony (is it bossy if you demand that people do whatever they want?).

Wedding seating sign -- Plaster & Disaster

Photo credit: Orlando Claffey (our wedding photographer)

Many people are familiar with the wedding tradition where the bride’s family sits on one side and the groom’s on the other, and since we didn’t want to do this we thought we better specify so no one was confused. I’m sure there would have been pure chaos and mayhem if not for this sign.

I came across many different ideas for such signs in the thousands of hours I spent on pinterest wedding planning.

Sources: 1. Jolie Mae Collections, on Etsy (affiliate link – read about our policies) | 2. Something Turquoise | 3. Glamour and Grace | 4. Dare to Dream Boutique, on Etsy (affiliate link – read about our policies)

But as of a few months before the wedding, I still didn’t know exactly how I was going to make one for us. Then I was walking to class one day (I was still in grad school at the time), and I came across this beauty on the sidewalk:

One side chalkboard, the other whiteboard. All sides good for coloring on with markers, apparently.

Of course I did what any normal person would do, and grabbed it and ran home with it (and then sprinted to class). (UPDATE: an awesome reader has identified this as the MALA easel from IKEA, so if you want to replicate this project but don’t serendipitously find one discarded on the side of the road, you can pick up a new one for just $15!)

For what it’s worth, this is certainly not the strangest trash collecting I did over the course of assembling wedding decor — there was also a phase where I realized I didn’t have enough pasta sauce jars yet for our table centerpieces, and I started picking them out of other people’s recycling whenever I came across them. Sam really did not care for this. But hey, I think our flowers looked lovely, and all the “vases” were free.

Anyway, back to the pristine easel.Clearly it needed a little love to whip it into shape. My first step was to saw off the legs, since I wanted something low to the ground that looked less like a child’s easel. I just used a hand saw, since we were still living in our apartment and I didn’t have a table saw yet.

Next I taped off the chalkboard, since my hope was to preserve that and just paint the frame and the whiteboard side of the easel.

I applied two coats of a semi-gloss turquoise paint I already had on hand — “Woodsy Scent” by Ace, which I’d used to paint a dresser previously. Once again, an illustration of why picking turquoise as one of my wedding colors was so convenient — I had so much turquoise decor and supplies on hand already since it’s my favorite color, so it seriously cut back on what we needed to buy new.

Speaking of favorite color, here’s me admiring how my new sign matches my nail polish.

I did decide that unfortunately the chalkboard surface just wasn’t in good enough condition to keep (the previous owner had made too many permanent marks…SO RUDE!). I had some chalkboard paint in my stash from some past projects, though, so I just applied two coats of that to give it a clean new surface.

Lastly, I used a chalk pen (which I find is easier to work with than actual chalk) to write a message on the new sign. Here is it hanging out in our apartment:

And on wedding day:

Photo credit: Orlando Claffey

With the fortuitous roadside rescue, this turned out to be a 100% free project, which in an engaged couple’s world is reason for celebration. Free easel, I want to spend my life with you!

(Sharing at AKA Design, Two Uses Tuesday, Think and Make Thursday, Your Turn to Shine, Link Party Palooza, That DIY Party, Your Turn to Shine Link Party, One Project at a Time, August Before and After, Remodelaholic, and Tip Me Tuesday.)

July 6, 2015 | By Sage |

A Celebratory Vacation

I hope everyone had a wonderful Fourth of July weekend! Sam and I were total hermits — we worked on a room painting project (more details to come next week!), went for a trail run to relive the fun we had two weekends ago, and roasted s’mores in our fire pit for the first time. It was lovely.

But here we are at Monday again! Somehow it always keeps rolling back around. Today I’m continuing our grand tradition of occasionally sharing about things besides DIY and home improvement, just to prove that we’re real people who do more than just paint, decorate, and turn cactuses into tables.

So today’s post is about an awesome vacation I recently took with my mother. I know what you’re thinking: most vacations are awesome. But this one was particularly special. It was also some of my other favorite adjectives: affordable, easy to plan, active, outdoorsy, devoid of large crowds, and full of ice cream and good conversation.

This summer my mom is having a milestone birthday, and last year I mentioned that I would really love to do a trip with her to celebrate. Now that I’m a married adult living in a different city, and especially now that my mom is fulfilling a dream that involves living on a sailboat in the Caribbean for most of the year, we don’t get to spend a lot of time together just the two of us.

Usually when someone says they are “captain” of their household, it’s metaphorical.

We started narrowing in on the idea of doing a hiking trip of some sort, since we both liked the idea of doing something active.

As luck would have it, my mom recently decided to fulfill another dream: to hike the Tour of Mont Blanc, a 100-mile trek that circumnavigates Mont Blanc (the highest peak in Europe) and passes through France, Switzerland, and Italy. My mom and I went to France together when I was young (eighteen years ago, which is crazy to me) and visited Mont Blanc, and ever since then she’s had this dream of doing the trek.

As much as I would love to do it with her, it’s 11 days long plus travel and I just couldn’t swing taking that amount of time off work. So instead, we planned a trip that would be great training for her. Our busy schedules meant it was going to be difficult to take on the logistical challenge of planning a backpacking trip (given the provisioning and advance planning involved), but instead we were able to stay in a cabin that my aunt and uncle own in Vermont (the amazing state where I was born and raised), and climb some of Vermont’s highest peaks in a series of day hikes. Granted Vermont mountains are pretty small compared to out west (our mountains are older, dammit!), but that seemed like the perfect level of fun and challenge for us.

As for what we hiked, we decided to tackle some elevation with a little distance thrown in for good measure. All told, we traversed 35 miles over 4 days, and climbed about 8,000 feet of elevation gain. Vermont has five peaks over 4,000 feet, and we hiked three of them (but none of them start right at sea level — they were all 2,000-2,500 foot climbs).

The first day was Killington:

It was super buggy on the trail and the summit, hence the squinting….

And we finished with celebratory soft-serve ice cream (in Vermont we call them creemees, and they are sold EVERYWHERE and it is AMAZING and I MISS VERMONT SO MUCH):

The second day was Camel’s Hump:

And again, celebratory creemee:

And the third day was Mt. Abraham (Mt. Abe):

Plus an additional 1.6 miles roundtrip to a second summit, Lincoln Peak — just 25 feet short of 4,000 feet:

And celebratory creemee:

Only one of the creemees is for me, I swear.

On our fourth day, we hiked a trail that goes around my hometown of Middlebury, Vermont. The trail is 16.5 miles, but we got a little lost at the beginning and ended up adding an extra mile — so we clocked in at 17.6 miles, which took us about 8 hours.

My “oh my god are we almost there?!?!?” face

And the celebratory creemee at the end:

At the end of every day, we returned to our cabin and cooked dinner together (except the last evening when we met up with my brother and his girlfriend for dinner).

It’s hard for me to describe how special this time with my mom was. With so much time together and no distractions (besides exhaustion), we moved past all the obvious topics of conversation that you cover when you just see someone for a day or two and had the most interesting discussions. We challenged ourselves together, encouraged one another to keep going when our legs were tired and the bugs fierce, celebrated together at the top of each mountain, and had no shame in eating soft serve ice cream four nights in a row before dinner.

And I’m so incredibly proud of my mom. I found this trip very challenging, and I was literally in the best shape of my life having run a marathon three weeks previously. She is an inspiration to me in so many ways, but this particular trip deepened my intense admiration for her brave and adventurous spirit, and the way she continues to challenge herself and pursue her dreams.

Happy birthday Mom, I love you, and you’re going to totally kick butt on Mont Blanc!