Valentines Day Project

After 12 years of marriage my hubby has learned how to speak my love language.  It is spoken not with chocolates, poetry, or candle lit dinners; No- it is with his willingness to provide manual labor for my many projects without questioning the sanity of my requests.  For you see, DH (dear husband) does not share my love of projects.  While I would be content to have a project going every weekend, he would much rather spend his weekends relaxing or doing something fun (which oddly enough, he does not put projects in that "fun" category).  So you can imagine how my heart swelled with love when he announced on Valentines Day that he would be my project slave for the upcoming weekend!!

Now, while I wasn't about to turn down his offer, his unexpected gift did cause a moment of panic to this recovering OCD sufferer because, you see, my 2013 Project Calendar did not have a major "require the hubby's full assistance" project down until August.  Well, good thing I am sooooo laid back these days because I just totally scratched thru "make office bulletin board" for my February project and wrote in "Wood Planked Walls in Living Room" in it's place.  Yep, Sister's main living area got wrapped in a wooden hug Valentines weekend.  

Here are a few pictures of Sister before Valentines Weekend:

Please ignore the hodge podge of furniture (this is the room all the left over furniture landed 3+ years ago when we moved in and has yet to leave).  For now, lets just focus on the walls.  Before the makeover they were painted in Sherwin Williams, Sawdust.  I really liked the color but Sister has her heart set on being a cottage rather than the traditional colonial girl she was born to be, and a cottage needs wood planked white washed walls.  So let the make-over begin....

DH and I have put up a wood wall in another room (another post at another time) but I wanted a different look than what we had done in the past.  So I scoured the internet looking for tips on how to best go about the project with ease of skill and money. With the help of pinterest I landed on one of my favorite blogs The House of Smiths.  The Smiths followed the diy advice from Sweet Pickens Furniture to wood wrap their dining room and so I took full advantage of all suggestions given from both blogs when approaching my project.  Since they did such a thorough job explaining the process I am just going to share a few "during" pictures so you will believe that DH and I really did do the work;)

I very sloppily painted the walls white before the plank went up so that you 
wouldn't be able to see the green between the planks.

Me sanding the boards

DH cutting the boards (He deserves an extra big picture because he was such a trooper during 
this project and because he looks extra cute in his pajama pants and looks like a 
real live carpenter with his safety goggles and pen in his mouth)

Planks going up

We started the project at 6pm on Friday night and stopped around 11pm that night.  Then we were rolling again by 8am with a break from 10am-1pm to restock on wood and an Upward Basketball game.  The planking was complete and room put back together by 6:30 Saturday night.  The project started strong with DH being meticulous about making sure each plank was level but by the end we were just eye balling the boards and at least every other sentence out of one of our mouths was "I am sure the paint will hide that" and "cottage style isn't meant to be perfect." I also overheard DH say under his breath several times "I did sign up for this."  That's right, honey, you did; and in the end it looked great!

And now I must confess something that will probably disqualify me from the diy blogland community. We hired someone to paint the planks.  Yes, that is right, over the years I have learned that I am a horrible painter of walls.  Give me any type of furniture and I will be perfectly happy to paint it (i.e. the TV stand, side tables, 123 chairs, the "&" can in the background in the pictures above are all painted by me) but I have an inability to successfully paint walls.  I think it is my OCD, if I get one smudge of paint outside of the desired perimeters I go nutso.  I can't tell you how many ceilings I have painted the color of my walls because I kept accidentally "cutting in" on the ceiling.  

So with a HUGE thanks to Nicholas the Painter I present the "after" pictures of Sister's cottage style white wood planked walls!!

So pleased with the walls but now that colonial style mantle is sticking out like a soar thumb.  Oh the plans I have for you, dear mantle..... all in good time.  Stay tuned...