It looks so damn cute, doesn't it?
A race car door frame track thing.
After seeing it in Real Simple, I wanted it for myself. Bad. Real Simple said all I needed was black paint, a one- to two- inch paintbrush, white adhesive Velcro, assorted Matchbox toy cars, and scissors.
All I needed...
Well, they were right. And I did it! After work yesterday and right before dinner, I rustled up some paint and a mini roller, sat the kids down in the hallway (why fuss over a doorway when you can glam up your well-trafficked hallway?) and started taping up some tracks. Then I painted. While we waited for the paint to dry, Junior helped me with the velcro.
We wolfed down dinner—"Mom! Can we see it now? Mom! Is the paint dry yet? Mom! Can we play on it? MOM!"—peeled away the tape and voila!
A race car wall track thing.
It looks kind of neat, right? I thought so too, but after about five minutes, Junior put down his car and looked at me dejectedly.
"This isn't as much fun as I thought," he admitted.
"Why?"
"Because the cars don't move!"
"You mean you don't like pulling them off the wall and then sticking them back on, over and over and over and over?"
"No."
"You mean you actually want to race them around the house by hand and see the wheels move?"
"Yes!" he said exasperatedly.
Junior's disinterest wasn't the only drawback to our newly painted hallway. At around 3 a.m. I awoke to the sound of something clattering. I grabbed Chuck's arm and told him someone was breaking into the house.
"Downstairs! I heard a noise!"
Nope. No burglar. The matchbox cars I'd taped up were on the heavier side and had fallen to the floor, one by one. Boy did that tickle him.
I didn't think the track had much more to give, but it did. An hour after Chuck's mom showed up this morning to babysit, she called me at work.
"Can we do something about those cars in the hallway?" she asked. "It's a death trap!"
Turns out no matter how many times she slapped the cars back up on the wall, they'd fall and turn her shoes into a pair of wobbly skates.
After she left that night, Chuck told me she thought I might be out to kill her (shouldn't I know better than to put something like that in a hallway, she wondered).
That may just have made this little project worth it.
Photo courtesy of Real Simple.
5 comments:
Other than the fact that I have no hallway long enough to pull something like that off, if I tried it, it would turn out much the same way.
interesting thought process your mother in law has there.
This is why I don't do crafts. Those crafty people are dirty liars.
Also, I suck, but that's not the point here.
That was a cute door in the bedroom, but I agree, no fun if the cars don't move on their own! I can't believe how straight your lines are! It looks like it would have taken forever! And I'm cracking up about the cars falling off. You can never really trust velcro and tape, can you?
I'm afraid that one might fall under the category of "looks good on paper". You should write a letter to Real Simple and demand an apology!
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