A month after our sweet Bridget was gone, I noticed our family wall didn’t have any photos of Oliver or Jasper. I also noticed our travel wall was missing photos from several great trips we’ve taken over the past few years (especially in 2019).
Because it was still early in the new year, I still had plenty of energy to tackle update. Little did I know part of the updates would take so much work!
First: The travel wall needed to travel a bit … onto the family wall. It was inevitable. I moved some of our family photos into the guest rooms, added new photos and rearranged the gallery.
Updating the main travel wall took a bit more work, time and resourcefulness than I expected.
One thing I wanted to do was add hats I’d brought back from my parents’ storage unit in Kansas – specifically my dad’s leather football helmet and my great-great-great grandfather’s bowler hat.
More than a decade ago I hung several hats collected from our travels on the wall in what was then the new Hayley House. (See this old blog post for details.)
You would think it would be simple to add two more.
You would be wrong. It was anything but simple.
I had to visit multiple stores to find the right type of hooks in stock. Then mid-hat hanging, I realized I couldn’t reach the location I needed to hang the final hat. My attempt at using our extension ladder was nixed by Kelly. A work friend mentioned using a Little Giant ladder, because it allows you to set up in a variety of configurations – including on stairs. I tried to rent a Little Giant and never found one in stock.
After lamenting my struggles on social media (because that’s what one does these days), another work friend suggested crowd sourcing for a Little Giant to borrow.
Wouldn’t you know? Crowd sourcing resulted in 5 offers of a Little Giant! It was easiest to borrow from a coworker and just 45 minutes later (ok, 4 days since I looked at it and thought about how to do it and whether or not I should wait for Kelly to be home before I climbed up 5 feet on stairs to reach a 10′ wall to screw things in…), I was done.
Hooray! I even took time to hang all of our half and full marathon medals from 2019 (12!) and update our running scratch-off-pin-it map.
Now all walls are up to date … until we get back from our 2020 travels, that is.
