Say Cheese!

I love photo booths.

For as long as these things have been around, they still manage to entice people to climb inside and press their faces together to make a silly statement in 4 frames or less.  What I particularly like about them is they have just one purpose to serve: Silliness. There aren't many things you can task with that one, single objective. 

Ok silly string, but that requires clean up.  A photo booth is just good clean fun.

We frequent another DIY blog of two twenty-somethings who like us, (this is the last year I can say that, so better get it in while I can) have decided to re-hab an older home.  The only difference between them and us is--- they are wildly successful with their blog, have attracted media attention and now write for DIY magazine, have a stint on HGTV and are supported by numerous big name advertisers.

So....

We're basically the same.

Anyway, I mention them because I was inspired by their equal love of photo booth-ery.  They even had one at their backyard wedding.  Two important points need to be made here: 

1. I LOVE backyard weddings
2. I LOVE the idea of a photo booth at a party/wedding/celebration
3. (ok...3 points) They cost about $1200 to rent for 4 hours! Say what?!

And that's where my love of them ends.

Evan and I have never actually been in photo booth together.  And in an equally as horrible example of terribleness, I have never done one with Alex either. 

Until now....

The aforementioned bloggers would place this on their sofa table in a tall goblet/jar/thingy where they keep and display all their adorable film strips. 

An adorable idea.  But with this being our very first photo booth experience, we are not ones to be outdone by amateurs--what with their incredibly easy to follow step-by-steps, fancy site features and money making advertisers-- we decided it was best to: Go Big or Go Home.

We went really BIG!

Okay...so in the end, we still haven't actually been to a photo booth.  But that's ok.  With a small (and finally complete!) first floor half-bathroom, a little imagination and Google Picasa, just about anything is possible. Even 3.5 foot photo strips. 

The best part: it didn't cost $1200 to rent a booth. And yes, we realize for a mere $4.50 we could have actually gone to the mall and started our very own mini-strip collection (which we may still do), but to make them life-sized would have easily set us back a few hundred dollars. So, we opted for the bigger and better DIY version, by making a relatively small investment ($28 including frames!) we saved some cheddar and just said cheese!