You Wanna Map? You Gotta Map!

At an undisclosed time ago, I purchased a rather large map of the United States as a Christmas gift for Ced. The idea behind owning a large map of the U.S. was to map out trips we'd take in our homebuilt airplane (this was before the Cozy came into the picture), mark locations we'd visit, and generally have a visual reference for places we plan to go. When it arrived, (we were still apartment-living) I attempted tacking it up on the wall with thumbtacks, but the darn thing was so large and awkward, I gave up for fear of kinking the laminate printout. Besides, poking a zillions holes in the wall to hold it up did not sound so appealing, especially when we'd have to take it down shortly to move.

So, it sat rolled up until we moved into the house. Then it sat rolled up in a corner of the house until we figured out which room it should go in. Finally, the office was the winning location, but just tacking it to the wall wouldn't work anymore. (We've been attempting to move beyond thumbtacking posters to the wall and actually preparing wall hangings with a more "polished" approach.)

After measuring and remeasuring, I went out into the single bay where we keep excess supplies. Ced had purchased some material a while ago to surface his workbench/CNC table. This bit of leftover material fit the bill and, after clearing that it wasn't reserved for another use, was cut down to fit the selected wall.

A trip to the local Home Depot was necessary to pick up a gallon of glue and a spreader. We both had a little bit of experience pushing around goop (a.k.a. tile/floor adhesive, grout, resin, whatever), so we "prepped" the area, let some glue glug out, and got to work coating the surface of the stiff material in the adhesive.

I had purchased a roll of corkboard online in preparation for this project. We rolled it onto the tacky surface, then found as many heavy objects as we could to weight down the corkboard to ensure a good adhesion to the porous material below. (We had just gotten in a large shipment of clay and sand (a tale for another time), which helped provide quite a bit of weight.)

We let the glue dry for a week or so before removing the weight and trimming the corkboard. After that, it was a matter of measuring, drilling, and mounting the sheet to the desired wall.

Once up, out came the map and we were finally able to display it.

Now, all we need are some straight pins, some travel plans, and time to finish our airplane!