Happy Map Day

This day has been 2 years in the making. Back when I lived in Indiana, Adam found a picture of the old electric line that used to run from Chicago into the western suburbs. It was ripped up in 1957 and is now used as a prairie path for people to exercise on. It has so many of the landmarks and cities that Adam grew up around so he really wanted to blow it up big and put it in our house. The first file he found me was super small so he did some research and called a local museum to find a file that was big enough to blow up to 2' x 4'.



The problem with blowing it up is that, you have to have a frame big enough to house it. Also ideally you don't want it to cost an arm and a leg (which they all do! and we don't have the skills to build one). It took us a year and a half to find one such frame at goodwill for $9.

We got rid of the old picture and let my obsession with gold win this one with a coat of spray paint.

The 2nd problem was to clean up the file (it had been in a brochure so it had some lines from being folded, stapled and had page numbers. This took some time but my media communications degree came in handy.

The third problem was getting it blown up at a reasonable price. Luckily, I knew an awesome vendor from working at Wheaton who was willing to work with us. The day the vendor dropped it off, Adam was so happy.  I mean we were both excited after working to make all the piece fall into place but it was really fun for me to bring it home after he had wanted it for so long.

Now we have it hanging in our living room and it's one of my favorite pieces in our apartment