Scrap Wood Wall- Part 1

Last week while reading Young House Love, I fell in love with a scrap wood wall that they posted from a trip to the Portland Home & Garden Show.  So I pinned it.  Of course.

Source: younghouselove.com via Shelby on Pinterest

I wasn't sure how Rob would feel about it but I was thinking it might be just the thing we were looking for our fireplace bump-out thing in our family room.  Rob has never been in love with the oak trim around the fireplace and every weekend he says he is going to rip it off and do something else.  Every weekend I have to persuade him to just wait a bit until we figure out what we want to do with it. This is what it looked like, except that we had stained that oak trim a darker color.



I knew I didn't want to tile it.  In my opinion, tile belongs in kitchens and bathrooms.  We thought about some faux stacked stone but were a little nervous about doing that ourselves.  So we have been talking about different ideas and looking into things for a few months now but have not found anything we both liked.  I showed it to Rob last Thursday or Friday night and he loved it.  There are so many pieces of scrap wood from all our projects around here that it should not be a problem to come up with enough material for the project.  We googled "scrap wood wall" and found some more images that we liked and pinned those too.

Source: houzz.com via Shelby on Pinterest

Source: houzz.com via Shelby on Pinterest

Yesterday afternoon, we decided it was go time.  Rob ripped the old trim off and started working on attaching the new pieces.  But oh, if only it were that simple.  He soon discovered that going around the two outside corners of the bump-out and leaving the opening for the fireplace made this job a lot more challenging than we anticipated.  While Rob worked on the scrap wood wall, I was in charge of keeping the boys busy elsewhere in the house.  Of course the only place they wanted to be was right where Daddy was and all the excitement was happening.  Usually they love to play in the basement but I could not keep them down there no matter how hard I tried.  This seemingly simple project is turning into a nightmare.



It has been a difficult project to say the least.  Rob likes things orderly and symmetrical so doing a random installation of lumber is really tough for him.  We've been through several different theories now on how the best way to actually do this is.  Rob even tried to draw it out once which made me laugh so hard because that is sooo my husband, trying to draw out a random pattern.  It's tough for him to be random and embrace the chaos.  I hear the nail gun firing away out there right now though so he's getting better at being random. This is what it's looking like by now.

We are going to carry the boards up just a little past where the highest white one is right now and finish it off with a little mantle.  And we are planning on painting it all so it is okay that we are using white MDF trim pieces along with the scrap lumber.  I'll let you know how it all turns out, hopefully in time for next week's Pinteractive post!