Can I just tell you how much I love the zipcar?!  I've already driven 3 cars in the past week - a Volkswagon Jetta, a Mini Cooper, and a Volvo S40.  I'm from LA so I love driving, and I missed it so much!

I've been driving upstate to take Sparky the cat to her vet appointments in a small town called Newburgh.  It's really heightened my already intense desire to move out of the city.  I know part of me will regret leaving the city, since most of my friends are here and everything happens in the city!  But I like houses and yards.  I want to throw dinner parties and barbecues and do all the things that people with houses do.  I'll even force my dad to build me a pond and waterfall of my very own. 

I've lived in cities for most of my life, and I'm just much more of a suburban/rural gal.  But Mr. Bee grew up in the burbs and hates them -- he definitely prefers living in the city.

If we did move, ideally it'd be within 45 minutes of the city, and accessible by public transportation.  I'm not really familiar with any cities outside of Manhattan, but I'd love to move upstate. 

It's not a possibility in the near future unfortunately, so I'll continue to daydream for now....

My post on this will go live on Weddingbee tomorrow, but I couldn't wait to give you guys a sneak peek!

This year a bunch of the bees and I decided to do a Secret Santa exchange.  The bees are all so crafty, so I knew I had to DIY something.  My gift to my Secret Santa was a DIY Weddingbee-opoly!

I got the idea when I saw this Make-Your-Own-Opoly game.  But the game is quite different from the original Monopoly (9 spaces on each side instead of 10), and I LOVE Monopoly.... I just couldn't settle for anything less than the original.  Luckily Mr. Bee found a psd of a Monopoly board online, so I was able to make changes to the template instead of starting from scratch!

Here's Smokey trying to help on our draft version...

And here is the final version:

I renamed all the properties after wedding vendors.  Starting from Go, they're: Bakers, Bridesmaid Dress Designers, Invitation Designers, Wedding Dress Designers, Wedding Planners, Florists, Photographers, and Honeymoons.  I changed the Railroads to Music - Ipod, String Quartet, DJ, and Band.  And Electric Company and Water Works became Videography and Lighting Designer. 

Instead of Go To Jail, I changed it to Go To In-Laws and the jail space now says Visiting In-Laws.  Apertura, one of the green properties seen above, is a nod to my Secret Santa's wedding photographer.

Once the board was finished, we printed it at Kinkos - they did an awesome job!

Brother-in-law Bee made the template for the properties in Excel so that made filling in the information easy.  You can see a real Monopoly property card in the top left for reference to see that it's virtually identical.

I used the existing Chance and Community Chest cards, but because we had renamed all the properties, some of the Chance cards were no longer applicable.  You can see a real Chance card at the top and the 6 I made in Excel below it.

It was pretty tricky creating a board.  I purchased this Tri Fold Foam Presentation Board from Staples thinking I could use the existing fold in the board.  But there was no give and the Monopoly sheet wouldn't lay flat when I glued it down and tried to fold the board.  So I cut the foam board, left a small gap in between the two pieces, and then taped them together with black duct tape.  That did the trick!  This is the back of the board:

I purchased lidded boxes to house the tokens/dice, hotels/houses, property cards, and community chest/chance cards.

Here is the board and box all wrapped up and ready to go.

Both BIL Bee (who's much better at Photoshop than me) and Mr. Bee helped me with formatting the board and the templates, and I couldn't have finished this project without them. 

This project involved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears... multiple trips to Kinkos, Paper Presentation, and Staples... but it was totally worth it.