My Surprise Wall

My Surprise Wall

Sometimes surprises dreamed up by the Hubby can be pretty good– this post is about my surprise wall. As you saw in my last post Kitchen Mayhem Update–We have a ceiling, we finally got our tongue and groove ceiling up in our kitchen. If you are new around here you can see how this all started with my original blog post Kitchen Mayhem. You can follow along with our journey and also see my mood board for my kitchen here in my blog post Kitchen Mayhem Part 2. Now that you are caught up, let’s talk about my surprise wall.

Tongue And Groove Backwards?

After installing our tongue and groove ceiling we had tons of scrap pieces lying around. I had two small pieces in my hand one evening looking at them and just happened to flip the connected pieces over. On the back side once connected they looked completely different. Instead of the beveled edges they had sharp right angled edges just like shiplap. Why did I never notice that?

Unexpected Wall Treatment

One day while I was at work I knew my Hubby’s friend was coming over to help with the hard labor part of the kitchen. What I didn’t know was that they came up with a plan to surprise me with a wall treatment on the wall just outside of our kitchen where our tiny half bath (powder room) and pantry are. I had noticed that they were pretty radio silent all day. No pictures or updates on what they were working on were coming through. What I didn’t know was that they had decided to go rogue and use all of the little scrap pieces of the tongue and groove that was left over from the ceiling and cover our powder room and pantry wall. They turned them all over so that the back side was facing out and just started attaching them. They looked just like shiplap! I was so surprised.

They managed to use all of the scrap up and just had to purchase one or two extra boards to complete the pantry wall and the two small end walls. We were struggling with what to do out there on those walls because they were original plaster and very damaged around the doors. This tongue and groove turned backwards was just the trick!

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What About The Doors?

As you can see the wall turned out fantastic! But what about those doors? The good news is that we had already planned on pulling out those bi-fold doors to the powder room and the pantry door really needed to go as well. We decided to use two sliding barndoors on one long track mounted on that wall to solve our problem. There is plenty of room for both doors to be side by side leaving the powder room open. When we need in the pantry we can just slide them both down toward the powder room. We found everything we needed on Amazon. Here is an example of the hardware and track on Amazon. Here is an example of our doors on Amazon. The doors are unfinished so now the question is do I stain them a nice Walnut or do I paint them a dark charcoal or black? What do you guys think?

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Paint Or Stain?

Now that you’ve seen my beautiful surprise wall that will be painted white (Chantilly Lace by Benjamin Moore) what do you think I should do with my sliding barn doors? Dark stain or a dark gray paint? Decisions, decisions. I will note that our barndoor track and hardware is black and that makes me lean toward the dark stain. The only problem is that just opposite of these doors is my kitchen and we will have butcherblock counters in there that will be lighter than the door examples I posted. Just like the ceiling, I’m afraid that it would turn into too many competing shades of brown. What do you think? Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts–paint or dark stain?

As always, thanks for stopping by!

mrslittlebylittle