The Spoon Room

29 Jan The Spoon Room

Photographed by Jodie Miears for Madeworthy Magazine

Cute Howdy shirt found here. 🙂

Hello hello!

When I posted this photo on Instagram a few days ago, I got tons of questions, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, how have I never written about the Spoon Room?!”

Side Note: I posted the below photo on Insta because we are taking that original 1919 water fountain and moving it to the kitchen for our cold water faucet. If you follow me on Instagram (please do! click here), you have probably been watching our kitchen renovation on Instagram Stories. Currently, we use the cold water button on our fridge A TON, but our new fridge does not have that option. So we decided to move this little fountain and hook it up to a chiller that will be in the basement. I’m super excited about it!

How the Spoon Room came to be is a fun story. And it has a sort of notoriety now in our little world. People come over, and they want to see the Spoon Room. They take pictures in it. They ask for the story. (They know just about everything around here has a story 😉 ) It’s a conversation starter for sure!

The Spoon Room is not really a room as much as it is a small hallway between our kitchen, the entry to the Dining Room, and the entry to our Playroom. (The door on the left goes to the Kitchen, and the door on the right goes to the Dining Room. The entry to the Playroom is to the right of the Dining Room door. The skinny door is an old ironing board.)

The idea for this space started a couple of years ago when I was at a garage sale. I found this bucket of spoons with a small sign that said “Bucket o’spoons $10“. They were black and grimy, but upon further inspection, I thought, “these might be silver!” I love finding collections of items, and I thought if the spoons were silver, they were worth way more than $20, so I lifted up the very heavy bucket and took it to the garage sale hosts to make my purchase. The second I set that bucket down, the lady looked at me wide eyed and busted out laughing. “YOU WANT THEEEESE?!!”, throwing her head back and roaring. After recovering, she looked over at her husband and said, “You owe me fifty bucks AND a massage!” Apparently, the couple had made a bet that no one would buy those spoons and they jokingly made that sign and price. Welp, little did they know someone like me existed (ha!), and how awesome they could be. 😉

“What in the world you are going to do with these?”, she asked me. “To be honest, I have no idea”, I replied, “but I think they are cool!”

I did not know what I was going to do with them, but how often does a bucket of silver spoons come around for $20? I knew I could do something neat with them, but first came the cleaning.

Are you inwardly groaning? Yeah, me too.

I’ll tell ya, it took seven months of cleaning off and on to get all of these done. There were over a thousand spoons in that bucket! (they’re not all silver, but most of them are) I eventually learned the fastest way to clean them was to soak them in ammonia to loosen the crazy grime and dirt, scrub them with a very fine steel wool pad, and then clean them with silver cleaner/polish, followed by a tarnish preventative.

I knew I wanted to display the spoons in a unique way, but I was not sure how until one night kind of late when I was putting the dishes away. I had just finished painting that little hallway Benjamin Moore’s Palladian Blue, and it struck me. The space felt so empty.

The only logical solution was to cover it in spoons, right? I mean, this little room is BEGGING for spoons, can you hear it?

I tried various methods of adhering them. Sticky putty. Industrial strength glue dots. Small command strips cut into tiny pieces. But what worked best? Hot glue. You heard that right. I basically bedazzled my walls with spoons. My eleven-year-old self was in heaven.

Here’s an in progress cell phone shot. I did not really have a rhyme or reason, I just placed them somewhat orderly without looking too perfect.

This was one of those projects I started around 10 o’clock and was so mentally focused on my work that I did not realize I had stayed up all night doing it until my husband came down the stairs early the next morning. You can imagine his response, “Is she genius? Ooooooor has she lost her mind just a little bit?” 🙂

I’m not sure what the answer is to be honest.

He jokingly refers to this space as my “White Box Challenge”. Haha! (Did anyone reading this ever watch Design Star on HGTV? The episode with the White Box Challenge was always my favorite!)

You may have noticed the ceiling wallpaper. As you know, I’m a fan of wallpaper on the ceiling, but what to put on this particular overhead surface puzzled me. But really, what type of wallpaper can you use in a room covered in spoons besides…spoon wallpaper?

Wallpaper found here.

Spoon wallpaper in a Spoon Room makes complete sense to me.

I’ll tell ya. I find spoon collections at estate sales and garage sales ALL THE TIME. People travel, and they buy spoons. They get them as gifts. Then when they pass, their family members have no idea what to do with them. How has no one ever thought of hot gluing them to walls? 🙂

The spoons are interesting, too. I have really really old ones. I have one with part of the Gettysburg Address inscribed on it, I have ones with pretty colors, funny sayings, places I’ve never heard of, and ones made of gold. The kids sometimes lay on their backs and play “I Spy” in the Spoon Room. It has definitely become a quirky part of our family.

And it’s a really small space, guys. I think in little spots like this, you can do something different. You can do something slightly more risky.

I felt a little like Tom Hanks in Cast Away when I stepped back, pounded my chest, and said, “I HAVE CREATED 3-D WALLPAPER!”

So there you have it. The Spoon Room. It’s a thing.

Until the next story.

xo, G