Day before baby shower: Gorilla Glue Disaster

In my continuing pursuit to replicate/create “I love Lucy” episodes, Friday night I learned a very important lesson. I learned that Gorilla Glue expands with pressure.

Since July, I have been on the lookout for creative ways to put our daughters name up in her room. Some of my friends have attached letters to bows, others have painted their baby’s name in stencil or on a wreath.

My mom picked up a home décor magazine and as she was looking through it, she saw letters hung up in a babies room with trim hung around it. They were white letters and the trim was white. The trim was custom made perfectly fitting around each letter. We both thought that was a cool idea, and my mom volunteered my dad to complete the job.

I found some cute, funky letters at Hobby Lobby. Luckily, they had all the letters to spell our daughter’s name, K-E-D-Z-I-E.

My dad bought the trim and took it to his parent’s house to cut it. They live about an hour away. My grandfather took one look at my dad’s new project and told him it would never work. He is a pretty experienced carpenter, so, dad broke the news to me and started thinking about other ideas.

As I was looking around their house, I realized that each of the letters would fit perfectly in an 8 x 10 frame. We made our way to Garden Ridge and I started looking at prices and frames. Man, being crafty is expensive!

I kept looking around and found a full-length mirror that you would hang on the back of a door. It was framed in white and had some cute detailing. It was long enough to fit all the letters and I was mentally composing my pinterest upload. Dad was going to glue it all together.

He brought it over to our house and the I had already fallen off. This week, when he went to hang it, the D and Z fell off. So, all we had left was K E     E.  Dad did buy some gorilla glue and told me he would fix it.

Well, Friday night, I decided to glue the letters back on. I carefully followed the directions on the back of the gorilla glue and then put hubby’s toolbox on top of the letters to make sure they were compressed properly.

We went out to dinner and when we came back I went to look at my creation. Little did I know that Gorilla Glue would expand. There were huge globs of gorilla glue protruding outside each of the letters.

I laughed so that I would not cry.

Luckily, my dad was over at my house and he, hubby and I worked on getting some of the glue off from the letters. We got out my nail polish remover, found a few plastic knives and got to work. After about 40 minutes it was still a mess—so dad took it home to work on. He has pretty much every tool/chemical imaginable including paint thinner, acetone, razor blades, etc.

n Saturday, the day of our baby shower, Dad proudly brought cleaned up and majorly improved version over to our house. I could not believe he was able to fix it. It looks great! I am so thankful for his patience and mad home improvement skills.

This was the finished product...before the letters started falling off.

Now, if I can only get the Gorilla Glue off my hands.