The One About My Project

I'm a pack rat.

In my defense, this only affects a few, very important things.

I save all of my t-shirts. Every single one. My roommate can attest, because there are three giant boxes in the top of our storage closet that contain shirts from college, high school, before high school. They're in the top of my storage area - so obviously I don't wear them. Why are they still hanging around? I'm convinced one day I will need them (want them) for something and then I will be really sad that I let them all go. I'm aware that this is irrational.

I also have MASSIVE binders filled with recipes from magazines we get at the office. We work for a food company so we have loads of food magazines. One summer, before I was working here full time, I was in charge of cleaning out our library and chucking all the magazines printed before 'X' date (classic intern assignment, right?). Well - it's against my nature to chuck things without knowing what they are, so I took them all home, pulled the recipes out that I wanted, and THEN recycled all the now almost empty magazines. Now those recipes are in sleeve protectors, in binders, in my apartment. I've convinced myself that one day I'm going to organize them all and suddenly become Giada.

Doubtful.

And it's fairly obvious that I have a large collection of books.

My current obsession? I want a cork board. NOT a board made out of prefab cork, a bulletin board made out of CORKS...from wine. I worked it all out and I need about 1,600 to make the cork board that I want. I want it to be the width of one side of my desk, and very tall.

In my room there is already a large collection of frames above my bed, and my desk sits on the same wall. I don't want anything else hanging on the wall so my solution is to build a bulletin board that could fit on the wall to the right and be exactly the right width for my desk, about 26 inches - or 28 corks. Now, if I want this cork board to be 28 corks wide, and a little more than double that height - 56 corks high....then I need 1,568 corks. That's a lot of wine.

You can buy similar cork boards from really cool stores like SkyMall - but they are much much smaller than what I am looking for and VERY expensive compared to how much it costs to buy the corks themselves costs. Plus - if I make it myself, then I can pick exactly how big I want the board to be.

So...now I'm moving on to making it myself.

At the Widget Manufacturing Co. you can buy used (because they have to be used) wine corks, they've just adjusted the price based on how many you are purchasing. For my little project it would cost $128 in corks alone - that's still pretty pricey.

There are a few people who are selling them on Ebay. Here, here and here. They have groups of anywhere from 20 corks to 1,700+. The 1,700 corks only costs $85, so at least thats less than on Widget.

Is it bad to buy the corks?

Should I just be saving up mine so that the bulletin board is meaningful? Does it matter if my bulletin board is meaningful? Should I just get a plain one and wrap it in fabric?

How long would it take me to save up $1,600 corks? Even if I drank a bottle of wine a day which is not happening it would take me close to 5 years to save up that many corks.

Oh, the conundrum.