Building A Frame

Yesterday, I showed you this big frame the hubs and I made for our daughters' room. We received The Handmade Walls 22 Inspiring Ideas to bring your walls to life, from the Handmade Home publisher. We decided to make the 'Wills' frame since it's of grander size and I knew I wanted something larger over our the dresser in our twins' room.

Excerpted from Handmade Walls: 22 Inspiring Ideas to Bring Your Walls to Life Copyright © 2013 by Jamin and Ashley Mills (thehandmadehome.net) and published by F+W Media, Inc. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

The material list for this frame is shown in the book. We bought 1"x3" pine boards from Home Depot. 

We started out cutting each of the pieces as shown in the the book. One piece of advice is to stack the four boards (for one square and make your two 45-degree cuts at the same time). This ensures all sides of your square are exactly the same. 

Instead of using the 90-degree corner brackets, we used wood glue and a brad nailer to assemble the four sides of each square. Since we cut all four sides at the same time, the corners were super-tight. 

We used a scrap piece of 3/4" birch plywood (leftover from our library bookshelves) instead of the MDF recommended in the book. We laid out the center square cut-out as recommended in the book. Instead of plunge cutting with a skill saw, we cut holes using a hole-saw and then used a jig saw to cut out the rest.
We used screws and wood glue to assemble the squares, white (primed and painted) backing boards, and frame.

The frame was built so that there would be 1" spaces between each square. To maintain an equal spacing, we cut 1" blocks out of scrap wood and put them between the squares while we assembled the parts.

Overall, this frame was a great D.I.Y project which took us a little over an hour to cut and assemble. After the frame was complete I did a light stain on top of the wood. The next day, I used good old frog tape to make my designs for the corners and used Rub N' Buff in Antique gold (same tube that I used for my sconces- that stuff just keeps going!).

We love how it turned out! Thanks Handmade Home for inspiring ideas in your lovely book. 

Just a side note if you've read this far: I entered a contest that East Coast Creative is putting on called

  Creating with the Stars. It's a HUGE contest with four challenges for only twelve top bloggers. I entered our library bookshelves 

(linked up to #84) please go see it. The more popular the project, the better my chances are for being a contender! Thank you so much! Come back tomorrow, I am having my first GIVEAWAY!!