Art You Can Vacuum - Part 1

I have a new art project to share with you guys, but it's such a long post I broke it into 3 parts. Here's a sneak peak of the final piece to keep you guessing.


I have to start by saying I've had this project rolling around in the back of my mind for a long time. 2 months? 6 months? How about 60 months? Yep, I've been wanting to do this for 5 years and finally made it happen. Without giving away too much of parts 2 and 3, let's just say I had some objects to display but I couldn't decide how to display them. All I knew was I wanted to do a series of smaller art pieces instead of one large piece. When the scraps from our recent shelf installation left me with 3, perfectly square wood boards I knew my (soon-to-be-disclosed) objects had met their soulmates.

true love

The objects I had in mind to display were round - a 5/8" circle to be exact - so I used a drill press to cut lots and lots of 5/8" holes in my boards. Twenty-five in each board, for those of you keeping track.

Next I used my electric rotary sander to sand off the pencil lines and give my boards a smooth surface. I only used 2 types of sandpaper - coarse grit and fine grit - because I was feeling lazy. I should have used at least 3, but since this isn't a piece of furniture I gave myself a break.

While I had the sander out I flipped the boards over and sanded down the rough parts left behind by the drill press. Again, if this were a piece of furniture I would have also filled the gaps with wood filler and re-sanded, but nobody was going to see the back so I let it slide. My only goal was to get the wood shards out of the way so my objects would slide smoothly in place.

Aah, much better.

My last step for this phase of the project was to prep and paint my boards white. I decided to leave the edges of the boards unpainted, to give a nice contrast to the crisp white paint, so I used painter's tape to mask off the edges. As you can (sort of) see in the picture, cat litter buckets make excellent spray paint tables.

Just a few quick coats of spray paint later, my boards were painted and ready to show off some mystery objects.

Remember, my boards were scrap from another project and the spray paint only cost me $3. Not a bad start, right?

Stay tuned for part 2.