DIY Wooden Photo Boards + Eric Church

Remember when I showed you this teaser last week?

Yeah, so there’s a story behind the photo.

That’s Eric Church in the photo. THE Eric Church.

So, John and I danced to “Like Jesus Does” by Eric Church for our first dance. Well, a friend of John’s named Taylor, who was in attendance at our wedding, just so happens to be friends with Eric Church. YEAH. I know. I’m jealous, too.

Anywho. Eric was playing a concert the night of our wedding in Greensboro… and since we had an earlier wedding, Taylor was able to make the show. Well, Taylor just so happened to hang out with Eric backstage and show him a VIDEO of our first dance. SO, that picture is Eric Church watching a video of our first dance on his cell phone the night of our wedding.

HOW COOL IS THAT?! Seriously. We woke up the morning after our wedding with a text from Taylor and that picture. BEST. GIFT. EVAR.

So anyway. I wanted to get the photo printed and display it in a cool way since it’s such an awesome story for us and the picture means so much – and I figured getting some first dance pictures printed along with it would be uber appropriate.

Now, a few weeks ago, I saw this company on Pinterest – making 3, 5×7 wooden “photo boards” for $95! $95! WHAT?! That’s crazy expensive. I knew I could make the same thing for cheaper. Like, WAY cheaper.

And I did. BOOM.

Here’s what I did!

I went to Home Depot and bought 3 pieces of plywood in 5×7″ cuts. Total cost for all three pieces? $0.51. Yeah, FITTY ONE CENTS.

Luckily we already had wood stain on hand. Hubs helped me stain the pieces while I took a photo.

Gotta let the pieces dry. After that, I grabbed my brushes, printed photos, and Mod Podge and got to work. (I already had all these things on hand)

I put a layer of Mod Podge on the wood.

Put the photo on the Mod Podge.

Put a layer of Mod Podge over the photo. If this is your first time using Mod Podge, don’t fret. It dries clear! Also, beware of shedding brushes. I kept having to deal with stray brush hairs. UGH.

I repeated the process on all the photos and pieces of wood.

Let the Mod Podge dry COMPLETELY. This may have to happen overnight – but for me it took a couple hours. Then gather some Polyurethane. Now, I had this can on hand already… but I bought this can last year and have used it on close to 10 projects and I’ve barely used ANY. One can goes a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY long way.

Put a good coating of Polyurethane on your dried, Mod Podged photo boards. Get the edges good, too.

Once they’re dry – this part did take longer to dry… get what you want to use to hang your photos. I got these Hammer Sawtooth Hangers from Wal-mart for $0.98 cents.

I measured out the center points of each board (the hammer sawtooth hangers are an inch wide so I measured the inch in the center of each board on the back and marked it with a Sharpie).

Then I knew where exactly to hammer in the hangars. They were even and centered. Phew. Oh, and please excuse the paper towel residue. Woops. I glued the paper towel to the back a little bit. My bad. Oh well, you can’t see it from the front.

Now, obviously once the hangers are on, you could leave it at that and hang your photo like that and they can stand on their own, but I wanted RIBBON! Our living room walls are a light green, and I’ve been incorporating pops of Kelly green throughout, so I opted for Kelly green ribbon I got on sale from Wal-mart for $1.00. I measured three strands of ribbon at the same length and looped them through. You could definitely do this differently, this is just how I opted to do it.

Then I measured the distance between the braces of the shelf on our wall so I could exactly measure where to put the photos.

I used pretty drawer knobs I got from Wal-mart and put them in the wall…

Voila!!!!!!!! Don’t they look AWESOME?!

I loveeeeeeee the uniqueness of the whole thing. I love the mis-matching look of the canvas photo on the left and the wooden photos on the right.

NOW, I’ll show you the rest of the shelf / living room area later… cause we’re working on a project (and I made a BUNCH of updates to this area since this photo was taken). But I just LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE the way the photo boards turned out!

So, yeah. I made all three photo boards for a total of… $7.25!! INCLUDING the photo printing costs. BOOM.

I feel like I should start my own Etsy shop making these for people. Would you order them or would you make them yourself? What do you think?

xoxo, all for now.