A nice toolboard for my workshop (by )

As an exercise in her art class, Sarah made some pictures by cutting out shapes in coloured paper:

The pictures

Coincidentally, at about this time, I was thinking that I ought to screw a bit of wood to the wall in my workshop and hang tools from it to make them more accessible, and to store them more compactly than having them sitting on a shelf (which is the worst way of using a shelf EVER). So I was delighted when Sarah announced that she'd thought her pictures could be stuck to a piece of wood to make me a toolboard...

So a piece of wood was obtained, and painted with a bit of help from Jean:

The board ready to be painted Jean helps

Then the pictures glued in place, and after the glue had dried, a thick coat of varnish applied:

Painted and pictures glued on

The next step, of course, was to actually shift the piles of junk to expose the wall above my workbench:

A bare wall waiting to be filled

Sarah's father then came and helped me mount the thing. We don't have any pictures of this happening, since it rather took both of us. We drilled six holes in the board, then he held it up on the wall while I drilled through the holes to mark the wall, noting in the process that the bit of wood had curved somewhat due to the varnished side contracting as it dried, meaning that the holes in the wood and the holes on the wall wouldn't quite align when it was screwed to the wall. Whoops. Well, we did the best we could; with the six holes transferred to small pilot holes on the wall, we took the board down again and drilled proper holes and put wallplugs in them, then he held the board up again while I put the screws in. For the interested, I used 6x40mm screws with cup washers to make a neat, strong, finish as the screws will be taking a fair bit of weight. Making the screws go through the holes in the board and mate with the wallplugs was a difficult task, but we managed it, and soon had a securely fastened board:

The board securely mounted onto the wall

Then it was a matter of screwing hooks in to mount my tools:

Starting to put hooks in

I tried to avoid putting hooks into the pictures Sarah had drawn, and tried to organise things so the bits of the board that will get the most scratched weren't the pictures. But before long, I had my tools all hanging nicely:

The finished product

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