galley gallery.
After deciding against the hassle of painting my fridge with chalkboard paint, I had to find a feasible solution for improving the side of my mundane old Maytag. (Kudos to you ladies who have done the chalkboard thing, but I just could not put that kind of effort into sanding, primer, etc.)
Whereas it was squeezed between a wall and a countertop before, the gentleman and I have moved into a new apartment and the right side of our refrigerator is now woefully exposed and serves as a partial “wall” to our dining area, which meets the kitchen. The new apartment is a bit of an upgrade, with higher quality fixtures and more of the good kind of character than the bad, so I’ve been trying to give it some extra attention as we get settled in. Plus, I gave away the Craigslist score that dutifully served as our table for a few years since I’m inheriting a lovely Ethan Allen dining table from my almost-mother-in-law. I needed an answer that was a easy to execute but looked elegant.
Turning to ol’ reliable Pinterest, I came across this great pin I’d snagged a while back from FabulousHomeBlog.com: a straight-forward project that paired magnets with lightweight picture frames to display photos more neatly. Luckily, my penchant for frugality paired with my boyfriend’s tendency to use our apartment as a film set means we have a ton of cheap photo frames hanging around. Once all the movie characters and exes were plucked out of them, I used some leftover magnets from a previous craft (turning beer bottle caps into fridge magnets, coincidentally) to hang the frames.
Since I’m kind of a master of disaster, I skipped the hot glue gun and instead used a drop of Gorilla Glue to hold each magnet firm. I figured it was a “better safe than sorry” kind of precaution; sometimes hot glue dries too smooth, which lets things separate easily, and I could already hear the crescendo of frames crashing to the floor. For that one step in the right direction, a minor mistake I made on a few of the frames was not securing the magnets to the outer edges. I thought a cluster of magnets glued to the center of the backing would work on a pic with a thin frame, but it does not. I’m still working out what household remedy I can use as a solvent to undo that boo-boo (I think nail polish remover?). I used four magnets, one on each corner, of medium frames and six to eight on those more in the 5×7 range, but it was mostly trial and error, seeing what would sink and what stayed in place.
I love that this common sense craft was so simple and really spruced up that space. Warm reminders of some of our favorite memories and people are displayed without cluttering a surface, and the white elephant in the room has been tamed. — Casandra Armour
