Using a Door for a Photo Gallery

My mother-in-law was a water color artist & my husband is a photographer. On top of all the numerous pieces of artwork they’ve produced we also collect works of other favorite artist. Needless to say, there is never enough wall space in our home to display all of our collections. I wanted to frame more of Bob’s photos and needed a place to display them.

We have a glass door in the house that had been painted over years ago for privacy purposes. The glass panels in the door are recessed, providing nice spaces for pictures. I decided that removing the paint would probably be too much work & I wasn’t sure the glass would come out clear enough. So I began looking for pre-made frames that would fit the spaces. Since they weren’t a standard frame size, the frugal side of me decided custom sized frames would be too costly. I was fortunate enough to find 8”x20” frames for around $6 per frame. They fit perfectly inside across the recessed areas. Now all I needed was to come up with a way of attaching them to the door. I was looking for something to bridge over the frame that I could screw into the wood frame of the door. On Ebay, I found some wood triangles that I thought would look interesting. I ordered a package of them & some small brass screws. I then had to stain them to match the color of the wood frames. I then attached them with 2 screws to the sides of the frame and one screw into the door. The most time consuming part of the project was choosing which photos (there are thousands to pick from) to put together in each frame and then cutting some mats to fit them. Now that they are up, I find myself constantly staring at the beautiful door gallery.

Repairing Vintage Wallpaper with Inkjet Canvas

This is how I repaired/replaced some vintage wallpaper in our tiny bathroom.
While having new windows installed, we discovered termite and wood rot damage to the bathroom window frame & wall. The damage extended along the upper part of the wall so we needed to knock it out to replace the studs & frame. But this meant removing the lovely art nouveau wallpaper that was my favorite part of the bathroom. I shopped around and online, looking for vintage patterns or anything black & white that might match, but couldn’t find anything appropriate. It was the wall directly across from the doorway so it would have looked odd without wallpaper. Tile extends 2/3 up the wall & the section of wall was only about 4’ wide, so it wasn’t a large section. It was vinyl wallpaper, so I attempted carefully to scrape it off and save it. Of course that didn’t go as well as expected and I ended up with many tiny fragments.

The wallpaper had an open weave cloth backing. I began to tape together the fragments of wallpaper on the front side and then glued cheesecloth to the back to hold them together. I only had one section about 20”x30” that was too broken up to reuse.
I was shopping for photo paper for my husband when I came across canvas made for inkjet printers. I came up with the idea of printing the design on it (I had seen pages from an old Sears Catalog used as wallpaper) so I figured the canvas would paste up well and the texture matched the existing wallpaper very well. I began placing the better sections on the scanner and scanning into jpg format. I had to edit parts of the image to fill in the damaged areas. I was then able to print out 8 ½”x11” sections. Luckily the design of overlapping illustrations gave me lots of places to form seam between the small prints. Somehow the new window & frame ended up narrower than the original, so I also needed to create two small strips to border each side of the window. In one of my many art books I found an Aubrey Beardsley design that went nicely. I scanned & printed those out too.
Then I thought about it going up in a moist and steamy room and that the ink might not hold up. I tried painting some polyurethane on one of the scrap portions but the ink bled. I then started researching to see if there was a product made for sealing injet prints. There was, but at $20 dollars per can & only available online, I didn’t want to wait. So I ended up buying clear coat spray with UV protection. I tested it out on another scrap, let it dry and glued it to a scrap of drywall. Looked great. But when I pasted up the real pieces ink bled. I think I used too much glue and got it too wet from the under side, which I hadn’t sprayed. I wasn’t going to remove it and try again, not that big a section anyway. So if you try it, clear coat both sides before gluing & use the glue sparingly.