The brick wall that almost wasn't

Brick wall that almost wasn't.

I have been really sick for three out of the last five days. Wipe you out, sleep all day kind of sick. This really threw a kink into my party plans. This unhappy and unfortunate sickness meant I had to scale back my expectations for the party a touch. I gave up the photo booth ideas and the enchanted ceiling. Sure, I made the candles to hang from the ceiling but it didn't make sense to use the candles during the middle of the day. Luckily, I woke this morning feeling much improved, enough to finish some of the remaining projects - labeling the bottles for the Potions class (and letting Hen test drive the Potions class), baking a pumpkin pie and two cakes, and creating the brick wall. About that brick wall...

After dropping Hen off at school, I made my way to Home Depot to pick up brick colored paint for the 9 3/4 platform I was going to make to hang in our doorway. I explained what I was doing to the paint specialists, they gave me a little advice, I got my paint and headed home. The rest should have been just fine. 

But it wasn't. Because I forgot one very small but extremely important thing until I had stamped nearly half the sheet with the dark brick red paint. 

You know that feverish state you sometimes get when you're getting over a cold? In the midst of experiencing that, I suddenly heard the paint expert's voice in my head repeating, "It'll soak through. It'll soak through. It'll soak through." Oh. Holy. Fuddruckers. IT WILL SOAK THROUGH. And we just had new tile put in last year. A very pale color of tile. A very pale color of tile that I had just painted a red brick pattern onto. Doh.

I can't say there wasn't a moment of panicking and expletive mutterings before I figured out my best approach was to clean it up as fast as possible, which is what I did. Quickly. Before that dang paint dried. 

I wasn't sure I was going to recover from that setback. There wasn't enough time to order another cheap gray sheet, I was already feeling pretty bad about having to scrap a few of my other ideas. But thankfully, a trip to Michael's helped me see an option that was still available. With 15 sheets of 12"x12" red paper, I was able to cut "bricks" out and tape them to our front door. It's not perfect. The kids should no longer attempt to run through it to get to the other side. But it will do the trick and it is definitely better than nothing. 

Of course, there are more pictures to share...

Note: The kids will have Galleons. Hen and I made salt dough money.

Everyone leaves with an owl.

There are spells and potions inside, along with much-needed note taking pages.

I tried to make the sign with photocopied pages but it just didn't look right so I ended up tearing (GASP!) pages directly out of the cheap paperback I bought at Powell's.

It's not the same but I'm happy with it nonetheless.