{wood wall}!!!

This weekend we completed a project I've been wanting to do since we've moved in!! One thing we noticed when house shopping is a lot of Texas homes have these "tv niches". The sellers of this house painted the niche brown. Not terrible but not a color I would choose. When looking at the house I thought it would be fun to stencil that niche but the walls are textured and since doing the stripe wall in the entry (what a challenge!) we quickly through that idea out. After looking on Pinterest I found some ideas on a "reclaimed wood wall".  The one below would be our "inspiration" piece.

LINK

But where to find the wood? Pallets? Reclaimed? We loved the look but still weren't sure how to get the look on the cheap so we mulled it over. One day I found THIS tutorial and we loved the look. They used fence boards to achieve the look so we looked into it and that's what we ended up doing.

The hardest part was the stain choice. Oh my goodness. You know you are pregnant when you cry over stain. I thought a dark walnut would give us a good look and just putting a sample on the edge of the wood we loved it. Until I did a few boards. ummm. NO. Looking more like 70's paneling :(.

 So, I did what any girl would do...call her dad for help!!! HELP!!! haha! We talked over all the stains and then he sent me pictures of real barnwood so I could see exactly what colors I needed. Who knew gray would be the color I actually needed. 

We ended up using Minwax Classic Gray. 

But it was still looking just "okay". That's when I added paint I had lying around to some boards and then applied the stain.  That helped to break it up and add some variation. This was a fun project. Each board I did was just enough different and it was fun to see how the next board would turn out.

After the boards were done, it was time to hand the project back over to Kit to install it and bring the dream to life! This took him only a few hours to complete and we couldn't be happier with this new look! It has started to bring or family room together. I have a few more projects I want to do in here but glad to this room going. It's been like a vanilla cave for 4 months!! :)

Before:

The only reason we were able to get all this done this past weekend was because the boys all had colds. They were miserable at times but thankfully all they wanted to do was lay around. That helped with crowd control to make it a movie day! After laying around all weekend, they are in much better spirits....as you can tell by the pictures below :). 

(For the record. Porter said I could not take his picture. He was "spiderman" and spiderman doesn't take pictures. nice one dude). 

Here are some close up pictures of the wall...

 Gisele thinks it makes the room feel cozy! haha!

 I put up a new collage too on the stair wall. What other initial will be adding?? :) 

 love it. love it. Kit outdid himself!!

(don't you love the fingerprints...haha!!)