I’ve mentioned a few times about a project my husband and I were working on, one that nearly drove us over the edge.

This was the sneak peak.

Now here’s the story.

My daughter’s preschool had a school auction to raise money for an outdoor cover on the playground so I decided to donate a gift certificate to my etsy shop.

I tried to think of a way to make an eye catching display and settled on a picture frame with chicken wire.

I found a large detailed frame, spray painted it black, and had my  husband add chicken wire to the back. I then spray painted some clothespins and hung up information about my  shop.

It looked something like this (I, of course, forgot to take pictures of the actual frame):

I also had a book of products with the frame:

After dropping off my donation, which I valued at just under $7,000 (or slightly less), I received an email from the school director asking if I could make 40 of the chicken wire frames for her staff for their end of the year gift.

“Jackpot!”

“Yippe!”

“Who needs Powerball?!”

We do, that’s who.

My husband and I jumped at the opportunity to make a little cash. Boy were we fools.

After saying “yes,” to the job, I scowered area Goodwill, thrift store, resale shop, and garage sale for about 3 weeks. I’m fairly sure there are no more 8 x 10 inch frames left in the DFW area.

After sanding down and spray painting about 9 of the frames, we decided to add the chicken wire. That’s where we ran into TROUBLE.

Out of the 9 frames, only 2 didn’t break.

At this point, we were a week out from the delivery date and freaking out a bit.

We were using a hand stapler and it just was not working.

So I decided to buy an automatic staple gun from Home Depot for $59 and hope that would help.

Thankfully, it worked (most of the time) and we were back on track.

Each frame also had glued on ribbon on the back so that the chicken wire scratch anyone.

Texas received quite a bit of rain during this time which under different circumstances would have been wonderful, though when you are trying to spray paint 40 frames, it really is awful.

Mix that with room mom meetings, field days at two schools, and a soccer tournament weekend and we were sprinting to get the frames completed.

A lot of the spray painting occurred in our garage (with the door up) but we are fairly sure we were high for two thirds of this project. Complex math was not our friend at this time.

In the end we finished on time (even providing an extra 2 frames, hence the 42 pains in the arse title), although I was drying clothespins with a hair dryer 30 minutes before the drop off.

Turned in, done!

A little money was made and a lot of learning too.

You would think I’m done with renovating frames but I’ve actually got some bigger frames just waiting in my garage. I’m going to start spray painting those soon.

Maybe next week.

On second thought, maybe next month.