Barnwood Wall

We repainted the interior of our old 100 year old church. It made everything one color and clean looking again. The trouble was that everything seemed very plain, so we decided to add a barn wood backdrop.

I read online that pallets are a great and free way to make a barn wood project, so I picked up a truckload of pallets from a farmer friend and started breaking them up. After a couple of hours hammering, prying, and sawing I had hardly any useable pieces of wood! Very frustrating!

I headed over to the lumber yard and purchased cheap 1x3 furring strips. They weren't free like the pallets, but I didn't have to kill myself trying to remove those spiral shanked nails!

I used a chop saw to cut random lengths of lumber.

I had a bunch of old cans of stain, so I mixed and matched until I had about 5 different colors to choose from.

I painted equal amounts of lumber and let it dry.

We screwed OSB sheets to the studs in the wall, so that everything was nice and flat.

We also removed the old door trim and covered the gap with OSB.

We decided to make slanted lines and a herring bone pattern to join at the center.

We started by cutting our beginning pieces with a 45 degree angle. Then we just kept trying to keep everything as straight and as randomly colored as possible.

We used an air stapler with 1 1/4" staples to attach the boards to the OSB.

We also covered the door so it would blend in better.

I picked up some black shelf brackets from the hardware store and some Edison bulbs, fixtures, and wire and hung those in a random way on the wall.

Then we hung up the cross, plugged in the lights and thankfully everything worked!