DIY Herringbone Wall

Now that time is somewhat at a premium, I longingly think about last fall when work was slow and I had some tantalizing free time. Most importantly, I capitalized on it. Painted the kids toy room; painted my daughter’s room, and completed an afternoon project that I’d thinking about for some time. It wasn’t the first time I’ve used a miter saw, but it was a new experience in that it also employed my design skills!

Dial back to when we built the addition: the house when we bought it actually came with a very primitive mudroom. Before demolition, we salvaged whatever we could that we could envision reusing or donating. My dad was an enormous help at the time, and when he saw that the mudroom was coming down, he tasked himself to remove all the barn wood that had been used to panel the walls. The wood isn’t terribly expensive; they are thin pine boards that aren’t particularly strong, and are very roughly planed. But since it covered all four walls of the room, he couldn’t bear to see it all just be carted away. So he painstakingly took out each and every board and pulled every nail, then neatly stacked the wood in the far corner of the old barn.

Demolition of old mudroom

While the addition was coming up, that wood was always in the back corner of my mind. What to do with it? Dad spent so much energy salvaging the boards, but there wasn’t copious amounts of it. Plus they had been cut in random sizes to fit the walls of the old room. Then I found some inspiration online.

An aside: There is indeed a difference between a chevron pattern and a herringbone. The chevron pattern has a 45 edge on each side; the herringbone pattern uses 90 deg edge but is laid out in a 45 pattern.
Mudroom Wall Before
Our new mudroom is far from being the most efficient; it is still one my works-in-progress. But it did have an empty wall that was longing for some attention. So I grabbed all the wood, sketched out a plan, and got to work. We have compressor and nail gun which made the task even easier. Find the studs, decide on a length, and start cutting. I literally took about 6 hours.
P9146482 DIY Herringbone Wall Natural Wood
Then I stood back and realized the warm, yellowy wood wasn’t contrasting enough with the yellow paint on the walls. So I took my random cans of leftover paint, and with my daughter’s suggestions, gave a lick of paint to a few of the boards. Pretty happy with the result!
DIY Herringbone Wall - Finished
The horns I bought at a Bibles for Missions store a couple of years back and the straw hats purchased in Mexico seem to go with the overall look – ya think?