The Ambivalent Crafter: Better Living through Crafts

Do you have some little thing in your house that just drives you nuts? Not a kid or a pet--it's a given that they will drive you nuts--but some component of your home that every time you see it you want to bash it with a sledgehammer?

When we built our house 11 years ago, we had the typical experience. Despite our diligence in regularly inspecting the work being performed, mistakes were made. There were big mistakes, little mistakes, medium mistakes: mistakes of every flavor, things you wouldn't even imagine.One of the mistakes was the placement of the kitchen phone jack. Remember waaaayyyy back 11 years ago when everyone had a home phone? Seems kind of quaint. But I digress...

I wanted a wall phone jack in the kitchen, to hang my phone on the wall, as it was in my mother's house and in her mother's house before her. Generations of the women of my family talked on the phone while lovingly fixing meals to nourish those they cared most about. This is as close to tradition as we get. I wanted to live in the ways of these women, having a phone near at hand while nuking leftovers.

The problem with the kitchen phone jack is that it was not placed in the kitchen. Ends up that the builder forgot to put it in, and when I pointed this out, the back splash tile was already installed, the walls were up, the wires were in, blah blah blah. Basically, it was inconvenient for them to put it in where the plans stated it should be: in the kitchen. The alternative, they decided, was to round the corner of the wall and put it in the living room, where, if you have monkey arms or are the love child of Plastic Man, you could possibly reach the phone while working in the kitchen. This means they added the protruding, plastic-faced wall jack at eye level at the entry of the room. Lovely.

I thought I could live with it. After all, we had really big mistakes to worry about, and it was a bad move to take their focus off those big problems. An unsightly wall jack in an inconvenient location seemed like something I could let go of.

However, that is not my style. I don't let go of things. Everyone needs a fatal flaw, and this one is mine (and I have a memory like an elephant--what a bad combination). Sure, time would pass where I wouldn't think about it, but sooner or later, I'd catch site of that plastic and metal wall tumor. It would remind me of every mistake the builder made. I knew that one day I'd take a look at it, run through the mental catalog of errors and how upset I was, which would remind me of some incident in the 2nd grade that also upset me, and then I'd remember other upsetting things, until, finally, I'd have a stroke. This wall jack was trying to kill me.

In order to improve my longevity without stepping into a gym, I decided the wall jack was the bad hair day of my home, and it needed a hat.

Using a frame I made last year at The Little Blue House as my inspiration, I took 2 unfinished wood frames (the cheapo kinds you buy at Michael's for your kid to paint as a Father's Day gift) and covered them with paint, scrapbook paper, and embossed metal sheets.

I was happy with the frame, but still had a problem. With the flat back of the frame, I couldn't hang it over top of the wall jack because the jack sticks out from the wall nearly a half inch. I needed to build up the back of the frame to accommodate the jack. To that end, I took an old, cheap metal frame that was in a box of crud in the garage, removed the glass, cardboard, and backing from it, and then glued the metal frame carcass to the back of the wooden frame. This gives the frame a lift around the entire back, effectively raising the back of the frame away from the wall enough to cover the jack.