Stairs of Entertainment

I have a crying baby on my lap, so hopefully I can be brief.

When we moved to Denver after graduation, I was overjoyed to have a real theater in town. Darin and I have seen The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Blue Man Group and The Lion King. We are too cheap to shell out the extra money for a collector's program, but I'm okay with the free programs that are full of advertisements. The covers still look nice and get the point across.

I still have the programs and tickets for Phantom and Wicked somewhere (I hope), maybe Blue Man Group, but I had a plan in mind to start hanging these mementos by the time we saw Lion King this past November, so I still knew where that stuff was.

The stairs leading to our unfinished basement has an entertainment theme to it. Since I eventually want a projector system with surround sound down there, this seems appropriate. But being that it is a basement stairwell, not well lit, and typically behind a closed door, I haven't felt the need to shell out the big bucks for nice frames. This is what I have done instead.

I found a two-pack of 18"x12" frames at Michaels for $8. Four bucks a frame? Score! Ideally, I would be able to use floating frames, but that is even more expensive than regular frames. I decided on a compromise by using black poster board as a background. Unfortunately, I didn't have any black on hand. After thinking about how I didn't want to go shopping for new sheets of poster board for two days, I decided to try an experiment with the yellow poster board I did have laying around--and that I would probably end up never using. (It came in a pack of assorted colors.)

Here we have the frame, poster board, program and ticket.

First I set the poster board on a self-healing mat and used the glass from the picture frame as a template for cutting the poster board using a craft knife.

I was able to get two 18"x12" pieces out of one sheet. I laid them in my "painting box" (a cardboard lid from a box for set of shelves we bought last year) and got ready to test my theory about painting poster board.

I didn't want the finished pieces to have an unnatural sheen, so I used flat black spray paint. I several light coats of paint. I kept on making passes until the poster boards were evenly coated. Then I let them dry overnight.

This is how it looked the next morning. I would deem this experiment a success! I'm so relieved that it worked so I no longer have to wonder what I'm going to do with all of those sheets of blue, green and yellow poster board I have. (They are left overs from when Darin built the boys a train for Halloween.)

Here it is all together. I used glue dots to hold the ticket in place, but the program is thick enough that the pressure between the glass and the backing is enough to keep it from sliding.

We also got a poster signed by the cast, that night. We would not have done it, but they were doing this thing where one could get a free poster for donating to a charity they were supporting. We decided to support the charity, so we got a poster. It is also mounted on a piece of black poster board, but in a larger frame I picked up at Walmart.

Here are the hangings at the bottom of the stairs. The blank one I hung just so that it wouldn't get lost/marred/broken. I'll fill it with a program and ticket with one of the other productions we've been too, if I find them; or a program and ticket from when we see Beauty and the Beast in March. Wicked is also back in town. We are still on the fence about whether or not to see it again since tickets can be kind of pricey.

Anyway, on the other side of the stairwell is a ledge that only makes sense when you see how they constructed the basement in relation to the garage. It's one of those oddities that when you first move in you look at it and think, "What am I ever going to do with that?" But I quickly decided that it was an excellent place for storing our ever expanding DVD/Blu-ray/Wii games collection.

This is what it looks like from the top of the stairs. I'm looking forward to filling the wall on the right over the years as we attend more stage productions. And we are almost to the point where we are going to start installing shelves on the left to make room for more disks. It's kind of exciting for me to look at stuff like this, all of that blank wall space, and see the opportunities in future years that it represents. :)