Happy Monday friends! Hope you all had a great weekend! I had a fabulous time working on some projects, spending time with a friend who came to visit and relaxing at the beach 🙂 Can’t get better than that!

So if you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the photo I posted on Saturday of a little something I was working on. A couple of you guessed it was a headboard, which of course put new ideas in my head, but I’m here to reveal to you it’s true identity!

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DIY FAUX DISTRESSED WOOD BACKDROP

As many of you know, or if you’re new around here, we rent a little apartment with not much natural light. Our living room is also painted a not so pretty brown that I just never put the effort into painting. Honestly, I’ve never been truly happy with any place in our apartment that I stage my photos.  Yes, I’m probably being too picky, but I can’t help it!

So when my blog got it’s new look last week, you may have noticed the wooden background, which I LOVE. This got me thinking…why don’t I make a wall similar to the background and use it as a backdrop to take my pictures against! BRILLIANT!

STEP 1: GATHERING AND PREPARING THE WOOD

At first I thought about making it out of pallets. I scrounged up about 4 of them and totally forgot about how much of a pain they are to take apart. The hubs has a broken pinky right now and isn’t very useful. So, I recruited one of my friends to come over and help me.

With hammers and crowbars and a lot of sweat, we got most of the wood off of 3 of the pallets. Taking a look at the pile, I knew it wasn’t going to be enough, and really didn’t want to deal with taking more of them apart.

I’d gone to Home Depot and looked around for wood there but really didn’t see anything that would work for what I wanted. I ended up going to a local lumber yard and explained what I wanted and placed an order. I probably should have asked to see the wood first because when we went to pick it up later, I realized they’d given me 2x4s. Just a wee bit thicker than what I needed.

The hubs was not amused. I’d already payed for the wood and at this point I just wanted to get this thing built. We loaded up the car and headed home to start building!

STEP 2: BUILDING THE WALL

Since this was just going to be leaning up against a wall, it didn’t need to be super sturdy. We used more 2x4s as the support beams and simply nailed the others as shown in the photo.

Pretty sure our neighbors hate us with all the hammering we’ve been doing lately. Oops 🙂 Once I had them all nailed in, we propped it up against the wall on our porch and I’m pretty certain it won’t ever move from that spot haha. This baby is HEAVY. I’ll worry about what I’m going to do with it in the winter when the time comes 🙂

STEP 3: STAIN

To achieve the distressed look the next step was to stain. I used Minwax’s Dark Walnut.

STEP 4: PAINT & DISTRESSING

I actually really like the way it looked stained, but that wouldn’t match my blog’s background, so I carried on. So, I grabbed some white and light grey paint that I had laying around and a large paintbrush. Using a VERY small amount of paint on the brush, I lightly brushed it on.

I did about 3 coats and was planning on doing some extra distressing with a sanding block, but it was just taking the paint off so I left it as is.

And that my friends is my new pride and joy! It turned out even better than I imagined and hopefully now everyone will understand why I wanted to build a wall 🙂

It may not match my background exactly but I’m ok with that and can’t wait to have my own little photo studio. Even if it is on our front porch 🙂 Neighbors DEF think I’m a crazy person.