I'm Never Buying My Husband a Present Again

I love my husband. I do. But man, can he be hard to shop for! When asked what he wants for birthdays or Christmas he replies, “A toilet made of solid gold.” Really?! Really. He says this so much that even our oldest has quoted him to her teachers! “My daddy wants a toilet made of solid gold!” #embarrassing

Since a toilet made of solid gold is just not in the cards, baby, I’m never buying him a present again. I’m making his gifts from now on, yo! He’s a lover of all things geography and maps and history and old stuff. And he likes adventure. (With a last name like Mountain you have to live up to it, right?)

So, here’s a DIY project I made him for Valentine’s Day.

The number sequences are the latitude and longitude of significant places in our relationship. For example, I used:

Where we met
Where we got engaged
Where we got married
Where we honeymooned
Where we had our babies
Where we live
Where we’ve traveled

I bet you have tons of other ideas to add. Let me know what they are!

YOU can do this project for the hard-to-buy-for-man in your life, too! To start, I looked up all the latitude and longitude points with the help of Google Maps.

Next, I found an image of a map I liked (again, with the help of my friend Google) and saved it to my computer.

Then I opened up PicMonkey. PicMonkey is a FREE photo editor. If you haven’t used it to edit photos yet, stop what you’re doing and go try it. It. rocks. my. world. I’ve tried other free editing software but PicMonkey is by far the easiest to use! Did I mention it’s FREE?! If you need a little assistance there are a lot of PicMonkey tutorials out there or you can use their help section.

After uploading my map, I used the Crop Tool and trimmed the edges of the map to get rid of the title and key.

Next I used the Text Tool to add a text box. Using the “Sue Ellen Francisco” font I entered the first latitude and longitude point. I repeated this process until all of our locations were on the map. I played around with font sizes and placement of the text boxes until I had it just right.

For the final text box I used “Tall Dark and Handsome” font in white to hold the quote “You are my greatest adventure.”

VOILA! That’s it! I’m waiting for a Groupon or Living Social print-to-canvas deal to get this hung on the wall. For now, it’s our computer desktop background.