Spent a few hours this weekend framing some posters I’d gotten for my apartment: panoramic skylines of Toronto and Montréal; a photo of the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, Canada; a shot of a beach with palm trees leaning over the ocean at Playa Buyé, Puerto Rico.

Got the frames cheap from Frames By Mail, and got the plexiglass and pressboard backing from a local Orchard Supply Hardware store. (Side note: Home Depot is really useless when it comes to customer service. Even if you can find someone who works there (and they’re surprisingly elusive considering they’re dressed in bright orange aprons) they’ll typically hardly lift a finger to help you.) At OSH, on the other hand, you have customer reps going out of their way to offer their help…)

Actually I ended up getting Lexan, a much stronger form of plastic glass than plexiglass. (Thick Lexan is used for “bulletproof” security applications.) It took the nice OSH rep who was helping me out almost an hour to cut the one sheet of Lexan into the custom-sized pieces I needed. Obviously Lexan is overkill for picture frames, but because the plexiglass and Lexan sheets were in the same “bin” I didn’t notice I was getting Lexan until well after they’d cut it. Lexan costs 2-3 times as much as regular plexiglass; luckily the OSH cashier also couldn’t see the difference, and charged me for ordinary plexiglass.