Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

For the last five years we’ve hosted Thanksgiving for our families (including when we lived in a one-bedroom apartment), and one year I decided to use wine corks to make little name placards so I started collecting them in preparation. I only needed a handful for the crew we had that year:

wine cork placecards -- Plaster & Disaster

Some quality pre-blog photography….

But somehow I got in the habit of saving corks as a result, and over time I found myself with dozens of them. Many dozens. It became a running joke with my friends that if there was a wine cork at a party or get-together, I would take it and put it in my purse. Actually there’s a cork in my purse right now. I have entire vases filled with corks that I don’t currently have a use for. But I just can’t stop myself (from drinking so much wine).

One day I’ll want to do something big and grande with them, and then I’ll be sad if I don’t have enough because I threw some away. Like maybe I’ll tile my whole house with them — cork floors are all the rage these days.

In the meantime, I’ve taken on some smaller projects with them, including an easy art project for above the built-in shelves in our former apartment that I’d previously turned into a little bar area:

DIY art -- creating a wine cork picture frame -- Plaster & Disaster

Again, we have some extra special pre-blog photography going on

It’s so meta, because it’s artwork for a bar made out of drinking-related materials. Woah, I know. If you’re interested in replicating this masterful project, here’s what I did:

I started with a backless, glassless frame from Michael’s (using a 50% off coupon), and then built a foundation for the corks using strips of posterboard. The idea was for the posterboard to sit right inside the frame and give me something to glue the corks onto so that they wouldn’t be glued directly on top of the artwork. Here’s a shot of the posterboard foundation I made:

Then I went to work laying out the corks in a pattern that seemed to work. After getting them all laid out, I then worked through them one by one, gluing them down using wood glue (which dried slowly enough to let me shift them around as needed).

For the artwork, I found a bar-themed print I liked on Etsy (from TheWordShop) (affiliate link – read about our policies) and ordered it in the color “Duck Egg” since I thought a bluey-green would look nice in the space. I cut a piece of foam core so that it would just overlap with the back of the frame (so I could glue the posterboard to the frame around the edges), and used double-sided tape to secure the print to the posterboard. Then I used hot glue to attach the posterboard to the frame. Not exactly a process I’d recommend for a priceless piece of art, but under the circumstances it was just fine. Then I hung it on the wall using the hardware that the frame came with and two nails. Easy peasy.

In the apartment we had it above our bar as shown in the photo above, but here it is hanging out on the buffet in our new house:

All in all, a very straightforward and quick project, if you don’t count the time required to collect all those corks (that depends on how much you drink/how shameless you are in taking corks from friends). One of my favorite details is that the champagne cork in the very center has the date “8/1/12” written on it. That’s the day Sam and I got engaged, from the champagne his family had waiting for us when we came back from the waterfall where he proposed (we got engaged while on a family vacation, but I promise that it was more romantic than that makes it sound).

I saved the cork (like I do) and wrote the date on it so I’d remember when it was from, and then when I was making the cork frame a year later came across it in my stash and decided to put it front and center. We’re not super romantic people (we have a quote about sandwiches engraved in our wedding rings, after all), but I like having subtle things like this that only we (and now the rest of the internet) know about.

ANYWAY. The moral of the story is that corks make good fodder for DIY art projects, whether they’re from milestone moments in your life or you gathered them up at a random party.

(Sharing at Earnest Home Co, Think and Make Thursdays, Saturday Sharefest, That DIY Party, Sarah Celebrates, Tip Me Tuesday, A Bowl Full of Lemons,AKA Design, and I Heart Naptime)

As our home tour explains, we use the back of our house as our primary entrance since that’s where the driveway is and we can use our sunroom as a mudroom rather than entering into our tiny front hall. That’s been just loads of fun this terrible winter because it means we have to keep both the front and back shoveled (front for the mailman and because we’re legally required to shovel the sidewalk in front of our house, back to, like, actually use). It’s also confusing when we give people directions because we don’t have an address at the back for them to type into GPS (the driveway actually accesses from an entirely different street than our front main address is on). But generally, we’ve like using the back.

One thing that bothered me from the moment we pulled into the driveway for the Open House was that giant satellite dish right next to the back door, though:

I think everyone can agree that satellite dishes are not attractive. They are tolerable when you are actually using them, and when you have put them somewhere as low-profile as possible. When they don’t meet these criteria — like when you don’t actually have satellite TV and they’re mounted almost on top of your main entrance — then that’s a different story. Sam claimed that he didn’t really notice it, but enough guests had remarked, “oh, do you have satellite?” that I knew it was catching everyone’s attention.

We have a lot of work to do to up the curb appeal of our house (I’ll do a longer post about our outdoor plans if the snow ever melts — apparently it takes a long time for five feet of snow to disappear!), but I knew that removing the satellite dish was a necessary and hopefully pretty easy step.

So how did we do it? First of all, let’s get a close up on the offender with this super helpful diagram I created:

The dish is bolted to a mounting plate, which in turn is bolted into the siding of the house. It also has two smaller mounting plates for the supporting arms. The cable from the dish into the house runs out the bottom of the dish and down the inside of the corner post on our siding, before entering the house through a small hole in the siding behind a drain pipe.

The first step was cutting the cable. We used some wire cutters we had on hand to cut it where it exits the house behind the drain pipe, and then pulled it up through the siding post so that the full length of it was free and unattached to our house. We didn’t want to mess around with pulling the cable out of our house, but the little nub that remains is totally hidden behind the gutter and is completely safe since it’s not connected to anything on either end.

Removing a satellite dish -- Plaster & Disaster

Left: the cable sticking out the end of the siding post after we snipped it free from the house behind the drain pipe: Right: Sam pulling the full length free of the siding post.

The big challenge was that we had no idea how heavy the satellite dish was, and hence how unwieldy/dangerous it would be when we removed the bolts and had to support the full weight ourselves. The dish is up high enough that we had to work on a ladder, and at the time only had a terrible rickety one. We’ve since invested in a better one so we could do things like this during the Winter Without Mercy or End:

Don’t be fooled by the lightweight apparel — this was on a rare day when it got above 30 degrees.

But we undertook this project in the fall when we’d never heard of ice dams and thought winter would be a peaceful and relaxing time, and we were using an old unstable ladder left behind by our seller.

I don’t have a lot of photos of the process, because it involved Sam standing on the ladder and unscrewing the bolts (we used a wrench, but if you had the right size socket for a socket wrench that would work ten million times better) while I balanced precariously on the patio railing to try to support the weight of the satellite dish as the bolts came out one-by-one. I was pretty nervous that when the dish finally came free it would knock me right off the railing, so we pulled the car up beside the patio so that if I fell I would fall on the roof of the car and thus much less far. It’s moments like these when we wonder if we’re really qualified to be homeowners….

Here’s one photo I did snap before we got into the heart of it. We started by unscrewing the arms from the main body of the dish, and then moved on to removing the bolts attaching the satellite dish to the main mounting plate. (Note: this photo shows Sam trying to detach the arms from the mounting plates rather than detach them from the satellite dish, but we realized that detaching them from the dish would be much faster and then when the dish was safely down we could take our time on the mounting plates).

When we got to the final few bolts, we switched jobs so that I was unscrewing the bolts and Sam was ready to “catch” the dish. Fortunately when it finally did come free, Sam was able to support it even from his precarious ladder perch, and guide it to the patio. It really was not as heavy as we feared it would be.

At that point, I took over the project and Sam went off to start raking. Nothing like a Saturday spent doing yardwork to make you feel like an adult.

First I worked to remove the arms from the mounting plates, and then the mounting plates from the siding.

Because the plates were screwed directly into the siding, they would leave big holes if I removed them entirely. So instead, once I removed the plates I just screwed the bolts back in to keep the holes covered. You can see where the two plates used to be and it’s now just two small bolts per mounting plate:

That left the main mounting plate. We debated leaving it because the bolts were really hard to get to, but ultimately I decided that if we were going to do this we should do it right. I did go out and buy a socket for our socket wrench because it was impossible to get our normal wrench into the crevices of the plate. I bought one of those really long sockets so that it could easily slip into the nooks and crannies of the plate. Well worth taking the time to run out for the socket, and frankly we should have done it right away — it was so much faster than the regular wrench.

Once I’d removed the main plate, I screwed the bolts back in just like for the smaller plates, leaving me with this:

Not invisible, but not super noticeable and so much better than having a bunch of open holes in our siding. From a distance, it’s not that visible.

And it’s definitely better than the original look! With spring in sight we’re starting to have the yard on our mind again (beyond simply triaging emergencies like 8-inch thick ice dams), and I’m so glad we took care of this simple project already!