Sprangles

Background

After we’d starting making a mess in the family room building the pantry, we realised that we should take the opportunity to make other changes to the room while we were there. It occurred to us that the wall at the other end of the room would look good with a couple of feature recesses, and thus another project was born.

Construction

This was another fairly simple construction job — a structural pine frame wall covered in gyprock just in front of the old wall. The labourious part of this project was plastering all the corners. There are downlights inside the top of each recess, and it’s a feature wall so people will look at it a lot, so the plastering had to be pretty high quality.

The only other complication was that we decided to build this wall 2 days before the electrian was due to come in to do the pantry, so I needed to complete the framing before he arrived so he could wire up the downlights. Lana sets a tight schedule!

Colours

The colours debate we were having about the pantry flowed on to the sample wall, with a small fortune spent on sample pots trying to pick a good colour. The decision was made even tougher by the fact that we decided to use a textured paint (Dulux Suede Effects) which takes about a week to settle on its final colour.

Final Colours

In the end we ended up choosing “Chalk U.S.A.” for all the walls in the main room with “Stallion white” ceiling, architraves and skirting boards. The feature wall is now a Suede effect paint called “Swiss Pear”. It’s all together and looks fantastic, and we’re really happy with the final product: it looks exactly like I imagined.

At the moment we’ve got some junk in the feature recesses to see how it will look, and we’re now on the hunt for some proper Objet D’Art to put in the recesses — something worthy of a spotlight.

View all the Flickr photos relating to the feature wall renovation.