Hi! I’m so happy to be on here with you all! The past couple of weeks have been really crazy traveling for work (if you’re new here you can read a little bit about what I do HERE) so it feels like a breath of fresh air to be sitting down to write this post. I have a long list to content to share with you all but I wanted to start with the most relevant in our lives right now and something you all seem to love hearing about… The paneled walls in the living room! Man has this been a project… I think Stephen and I both thought it would’ve been a lot easier to do than it has been. It hasn’t been DIFFICULT necessarily, but it is taking us a long time to complete because of a couple of things we failed to think about ahead of time. I’ll share a brief update of where we’re at later in the post but first I wanted to explain why we decided to do this!

We’re coming up to the one year mark of living in our new house. Isn’t that crazy?! The year has flown by. I’ve shared a little bit about the process (I plan to share all of the details within the next month) but the builder was set ahead of time for the neighborhood we decided to live in so it was up to us to just pick a lot and pick the layout of the house we wanted to live in/pay for. Once I saw this model out of the options it was pretty much a done deal for me. What won me over? The living room and kitchen. I LOVE the open space. To me it feels like the perfect place to gather with friends and family and promotes fellowship in our home. That’s exactly what we both desire so as soon as I showed Stephen, it was a done deal.

What I didn’t think about was the struggle it would be to design and decorate in this space. It is SO LARGE, especially the one wall opposite of the TV, that anything I hung up or put over there looked really small. The whole room felt a bit cold to me so I was determined to find a way to cozy it up.

This first (big) wall paneled!

I searched all over Pinterest to find inspiration. I knew beams would automatically make the space feel cozy but with our budget and the timeline of us living here that wasn’t going to happen. It also would be very difficult considering the pitch of our roof and the way the ceiling vaults aka it wouldn’t be something Stephen and I would be able to do… We’d have to pay someone so again, that wasn’t going to happen.

For a minute I thought about just doing something to the big wall but I knew that wouldn’t solve the problem. If we shiplapped the wall for example, then we’d just have a giant shiplapped wall. The same thing would happen with wallpaper. Every thing else would still feel small. Then I thought, “What if I create a wall of sorts so that it creates a boundary to the eyes?” Again, I searched all over Pinterest for inspiration and couldn’t find much.

Boxwood Avenue

It’s no secret I love a good wall treatment! I went back and forth between doing vertical shiplap and horizontal shiplap but I couldn’t set my mind on either.  I wanted to add dimension and a touch of texture to the walls but I also didn’t want it to weigh the room down. As much as I love shiplap, I knew that we’d be selling this house and I was worried about buyers that didn’t like it as much. Then I remembered Chloe’s (you can find her amazing blog HERE) bathroom and entryway and remembered how much I loved those spaces. What did they have in common other than Chloe’s beautiful sense of style? Paneling. Eventually it was between vertical tongue and groove like she has in her laundry room in the photo above and wood paneling like she has in the photos below. I talked with her about it and she said she loved her painted paneling more than the pine tongue and groove panels because the pine will expand and shrink over time with the temperature so it requires some more maintenance with paint. That was the deciding factor for us! We went ahead with the paneling.

Boxwood Avenue

In short, here’s why we added wall paneling to the living room and eating area: to add texture to the space and to make the room feel a bit “smaller” visually which both contribute to the ultimate goal of our home – COZY. Some people may think that we’re crazy for adding paneling but we believed it would achieve our goals for this room so we did it.

Boxwood Avenue

How’s the paneling going? It has taken us a good bit of time (just about a month+, in fact) but it’s going! We finished painting the second coat this weekend and have just a few more places to touch up before it’s complete. I’m so happy to say that I believe I will be able to share the reveal this week! We learned a lot through this process per usual so I will definitely share those lessons with you all in the post.

Thank you all so much for the support! I’ve loved the “Update us on the wall!!!” messages I’ve received these past two weeks from you all on Instagram. You guys rock. It means so much to me that you reach out to me!