floater frame

When we were staging our condo to show (almost a whole year ago, wow) I had some spare time so instead of renting/buying art to put up I painted a few things. DIY strikes again! And as a glimpse of things to come, I loved what we ended up with while the wife wasn’t 100% convinced.

She was on-board with the two large pieces though, and they’ve made it into our new living room on nails that the previous owner left in the wall. Putting these up helped a new house instantly feel more like home, and they’ve stayed up even though I initially just put them on the wall to help get them out of the way when we moved in.

They're 24x30

That was eight months ago, and I painted these a year ago almost to the day. So to commemorate the occasion I used another day off to make a materials run and put together some DIY floater frames for our DIY masterpieces. I know, anything to distract from finishing the rest of the basement.

All I had in mind was just a larger version of the frame for Payton’s picture, turned backwards so the canvas can be attached to the inside lip, leaving the outside to surround the canvas with a little gap. I think white is a good starting point but to give it some additional depth, I decided to spray the inner lip with the dark blue paint I had around. Hopefully it compliments the blues in each painting without taking focus away.

In my excitement to get these done I ended up buying more 1x2 than I really needed, and had just enough left over to slap together a display for my Notre Dame banner too. More on that later though.

All in all these weren’t a difficult build. Using two paint colors slowed things down a bit as I let things dry, and not all the corners were the sharpest when I put everything together but all in all they ended up looking pretty good. Using wood joiners helped speed things up too, I with I had thought to use them a long time ago. We’ll see how well the paintings actually go in later this week.

Planning for the spacing; shooting for an extra 1/8 inch surround

All the cuts plus the outer frame plane

About to get the spray paint out

Fixing a bit of mess on a corner

Glued and drying

By the way, the other two the wife wasn’t entirely crazy about? Just went up in the nearly finished basement while I wait to see when I can tile over the fireplace. Hey, art is subjective and I still like them. At least they’ve found a spot, maybe they'll get frames next.

I don't care, I like these

 Purchase list:

6 8 foot 1x2"s