I Dream In Burlap...

It has been a long three days at PJP Buttonwood.  We've been working on our walls in our new space and nothing about that process has been easy (it has mainly been sticky, grimy, and exhausting). If you recall, we left off two weeks ago with this wall:

When we locked up the shop late on the day we finished this burlap based grid work, neither of us were convinced.  It started with promise, but as we finished the last strips we started to question ourselves.  We honestly weren't sure if we didn't like it or if we just had impaired judgment from huffing adhesive spray glue for 12 hours.

The following week wasn't kind to our unique-but-potentially-too-crazy wall.  The subcontractor tore down the top row AND the bottom row in order to finish out some electrical work (I say that calmly but rest assured there was some wailing and gnashing of teeth when we saw our broken lattice top).  Over the next days, Jeanne eyed that wall and it eyed her back.  They were in a showdown and finally Jeanne won...she pulled the burlap down on the theory it was too "wrinkle-y" (my personal feelings were that it made me feel like I was in queue for a ride at Silver Dollar City).  Our wall was left with a lot of adhesive spray marks and looked as dejected and confused as we felt about it.

We called reinforcements to repaint the wall...but it would need to be sanded first because of all the glue.  This may or may not be the part where I sort of lost my mind.  I am not a crafty person at all...I sort of break out in hives if someone suggests I fashion an item out of duct tape or loom a bracelet out of rubber bands.  Looking at an empty wall covered in burlap hairs and glue?  Little overwhelming, to say the very least.

We both know that in situations where we can't figure out what we want to do, it is best if we can just hang out together and brainstorm.  This is how we ended up roaming the aisles at Menard's on Sunday morning and considering every possible option (and some options not so possible).  At one point, we had three Menard's employees following us around to see what we might end up choosing (possible options?  chicken wire, ceiling tiles, peel-and-stick laminate, tile, and bamboo fencing).  In the end all we bought was wallpaper paste, a light fixture, and a mirror for the bathroom.

Slowly but surely, a plan started to take form.  The outside perimeter (the glue free part) had been painted (again) in Valspar's Frontier Road and looked lovely.  We decided to hang wallpaper in the middle section, thus making it look like the painted walls framed the wallpaper, giving the wall texture and dimension.

It took ALL THE HOURS to figure out the logistics of the wallpaper.  Would it work?  Could we keep our lines level?  Did we want to paint the wallpaper?  All options that made us fairly crazy.  The wall is 18x20 and we left a four foot perimeter around our inset of textured wallpaper.

If you want to test the tensile strength of your relationship with another human, I suggest wallpapering from a scissor list while sharing a bucket of glue and a large wallpaper brush.   We probably went up and down on the scissor lift 100 times over the course of the afternoon.  The drywall guy graciously let us borrow the lift and it felt a little like when Ferris and Cameron drop the Ferrari off at the downtown Chicago parking garage and the parking attendants spend all day driving around in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  It is a good thing scissor lifts don't have odometers, or we would have been trying to roll it back.

Once we hung the strips of wallpaper, we framed that in burlap...creating a multi-dimensional affect that drives your eye up and over the walls.  (We are also both really stubborn people and we couldn't let the whole burlap thing go out of principal.)  And if you are reading this blog for crafting tips, then 1) you are reading the wrong blog, and 2) wallpaper paste will adhere burlap to the wall and the burlap won't move an inch.  The moral of this story - if you come to PJP Buttonwood and see the burlap on the walls and hate it, don't tell us because the only way around that is to have entirely new walls constructed.

Now would be a good time to share a picture, but I forgot to snap a pic given my late night exhausted stupor.  If you are interested to see how it all turned out, you better plan to stop by the party on Saturday or come by during open hours once we have our occupancy permit from the City of Columbia (that could be later this week or early next week...I'm really afraid to ask at this point).

We did stop by PJP Buttonwood early this morning and got the thumbs up approval from Contractor Wayne on our wall creation.  (Contractor Glenn said if it made us happy, he was happy...well played, Glenn).

Remember a last week we discussed the health department mandated FRP board that must be installed around the baking area for easy cleaning of surfaces?  It is expensive and so so so very ugly.  Jeanne had a GENIUS idea - could we install metal sheets rather than FRP?  Metal sheets are shockingly less ugly than FRP and about the same cost.  Surprisingly the health department said ok (mark the date down...that is the first time they have agreed to anything we've proposed).  The crew started early this morning on putting those up and here is a quick peek of our Industrial Chic love...

So there you go - 991 words about walls and wall treatments.  Let us never discuss burlap, adhesive glue, or scissor lifts again.