My dad always used to say “measure twice, cut once.” That has never been more in my mind than this week!
In my haste to get things done during this busy holiday season, I made two careless decisions – NOT to actually measure something before purchasing!
The first was my wall oven. Ours stopped working last week [the week before Christmas – not the ideal time! Baking! Cooking! Tradition!] I ran to the appliance store and replaced my old GE Monogram with the “same” new GE Monogram oven. My sales guy said they were the same size, but did I take the time to actually check the specs? Nooooo!
Long story short, my new oven was 4 inches higher than the old one. Which meant that the installers had to cut the cabinetry to make the new one fit. Which means I have sawdust all over my kitchen. What should have been a half hour installation instead took them three hours. My husband Curt even got in the mix!
The second error I made had to do with something near and dear to my heart – – a wall portrait of Lauren.
In the summer, I purchased a beautiful Organic Bloom frame in Metallic Bronze that I wanted to use for a holiday wall portrait for above my fireplace. I knew I wanted to set up a shoot for my daughter with a winter hat, maybe even snow, that would look great in the frame, on the fireplace, during Christmas.
The shoot was a success and I’d selected my favorite image for the frame. I ran back to the studio to look at the frame, just to double check its size before ordering the print.
Well, I didn’t actually CHECK the size, I just took a quick glance at it.
And I ordered a 24×24 mounted image. Except the frame is a 20×20. Oops, epic fail.
Measure twice, cut once.
Lucky for me, I have a couple of things going for me. First, I have a dad that is not only very wise [i.e. “measure twice, cut once” wisdom] but he’s also very handy. In fact, most of the things in my Brighton Michigan studio look so great because of him. Second, I did crop the image of Lauren a bit wider than I should have. That meant in theory, we might be able to cut the image to size, even though it’s mounted on 3 mm styrene.
So I ran out to my dad’s, and we carefully cut the image to size with an exacto knife. An hour later, it looked perfect for the frame!
Here’s what it looks like on my fireplace today:
