MBTA subway "art"

So, I had this idea: why not put a framed picture of the Boston subway system on my wall?

I have been looking at the T map for the past few weeks as we are moving there in August. It's colorful, it represents eco-friendliness, and years of hard work and ingenuity.

I found a picture of the system that was very big via Google. Then I opened this picture in basic Paint that comes with all PC's and began cleaning up some things. The picture had some weird little imperfections that I fixed with Paint.

Next, I decided I wanted to put the picture in an Ikea frame, the FJÄLLSTA. Which is 19.75" x 19.75". How big is this in pixels? A handy calculator converts inches to pixels and vice versa.

So I need it to be 1481 x 1481 pixels. I resized the image to these dimensions. Only thing is that the picture isnt a perfect square. So resized it was 1481 x 1425. I changed the attributes within Paint to be 1481 x 1481. This left about a half inch on the top of the picture of white area. I took a sample of the picture background and then filled in that white with the greyish background color.

Next, I loaded the pic on a jumpdrive and took it to Kinkos. They charged me $23 and it was ready in about 2 hours.

It came out exactly 19.75" x 19.75". I loaded it into the Ikea frame which was $20, and voila.

I think it came out pretty good. Now we can learn the T routes simply and we have a cool piece of "art" on our walls.

I'm on Apartment Therapy

My bike rack made it onto Apartment Therapy, thats cool!

Indoor Bike Storage

Well, thought I'd share something I built a while back.

I had 4 bikes and needed an indoor storage solution and was unimpressed by the commercial indoor bike racks and astonished at their price. So I designed my own.

Although the pictures only show 2 bikes, I've had 4 up there for about a year with no issues.

Also, it takes up much less space due to the way I have the bikes hanging. I have hooks on it to hold items such as helmets, etc.

There are only two small holes (see the photo of the L bracket) going directly into the stud------good for getting your apartment's security deposit back.

Lastly, it cost about $40 to build.