We had some pretty limited options when we moved here as far as housing goes. We looked all over the Seattle metro and when we finally focused in on the area we wanted, we had two options. Literally two. On the same street. It’s a small town and with summer coming to an end, rentals were scarce. One house was small and one house was big. The small house had better finishes but it wouldn’t have been much of an upgrade from the corporate housing apartment in terms of space. We worried about having guests and how cramped we would feel day to day. The bigger home had nearly zero upgrades but had room to spread out, almost too much room. In the end we settled on the bigger home. I’m really glad we did but it has a giant empty room right now and so many empty walls. I really don’t want to fill this home up and then have to move it all when we move back to Minnesota or move to a more permanent home here. While I’d love to fill my walls, I have commitment issues when it comes art décor and like to rearrange often. I also am not someone who just likes to throw something cute up on the walls. I am not a fan of clutter and if it’s in my house, I want it to be important to us.
With all this in mind, I did want our house to feel homey and so I set out to figure out how to do that one room at a time. I’m nowhere near finished, but I’m at a good resting point for now.
The big boys ended up wanting the astronaut bedding from Target’s Pillowfort line. I was really bummed because I had amazing quilts in mind that I was going to make but I wanted to give them some ownership and my husband was side-eyeing me because I wanted to control the situation. Fine, we’ll get the astronaut bedding. The big boys each upgraded to full size beds when we moved and the babe upgraded to a queen size that’ll also be used for guests. He went with the dino bedding, also from Pillowfort. No surprise there.
My kids love space, like a lot, so I headed over to NASA’s website to see if I could find anything for their room. Guess what I found? One of the groups at NASA has made “Vision of the Future” posters and they are awesome. They are advertisements based around space travel and each have fun facts on them about the planet or star that they are advertising. I knew they’d be perfect in the boys’ room. I had them printed at our local UPS store on 11×17 paper. The copies were just under a dollar a piece. I didn’t want to frame them but I didn’t want to just hang them unmounted either. Here comes some teacher knowledge! The Dollar Tree has 20×30 foam board for $1 a sheet. I bought a whole box, knowing I’d use it for other projects.
The next part was cutting the foam board down to size. I researched this and thought the best option was going to be using a new blade in an Exacto knife. Wrong. It sucked. It left jagged edges, and the foam fell apart.
I started brainstorming what else I could use. Aha! I bought this wood burning tool for a project a couple years ago and it came with a blade attachment. I thought I might as well try it. What? It cut through that foam board like butter. Smooth edges, no extra foam laying around. Gorgeous.
I cut all my pieces and then used double sided tape to adhere the posters to the foam board. I used Command strips from 3M so that all those posters leave no damage.
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