About 10 weeks ago bridal show season was looming and completely stressing me out. We had no wall to display our pictures and I had no idea what to do. I wanted our 2015 bridal show wall to be wood. Or made of wood. Or at least LOOK like wood. This was proving really difficult because the design had to follow a specific set of self-imposed guidelines:

1A. It had to be sturdy (aka, it can’t fall down during the show)
2. It had to be relatively inexpensive (especially since I keep changing our backdrop)
3. It had to compliment our branding
4. It had to fit in our Prius v along with anything else we bring.
5. It can’t be too heavy for bulky, I need to be able to carry it in by myself if necessary.
6. It had to be professional! (not too rustic)

They say that dreams are your minds way of working through problems, and this is usually true for me, but generally in an unhelpful abstract way. However after 2 or 3 nights of having a incredibly difficult time sleeping over the idea of not having a bridal show wall dreams were the least of my concerns. Until one night around 2am when I finally drifted off and all the pieces came together.
Literally. My dream consisted of a completely white void and the wood pieces of my wall floating around each other until they had built what I wanted. Suddenly it all clicked!

The next day I drew it for Eric and thankfully he generally supports my crazy ideas so next we made plans for the wood!

We went on Lowe’s website and started to calculate how much the wall would cost us. To keep it around $200 in materials we opted for “white boards”. I actually have no idea what kind of wood that is, which freaked me out just a little because I wanted to stain them.

But in the end, it came out great!! I used Rustoleum’s Weathered Grey to stain the wood, but first I pre-conditioned each board, the process went like this:

1. Sand each board (I used about 220 grit, very fine sandpaper).
2. Clean/dust each board
3. Pre-condition each board
4. Sand them again
5. Clean/dust them again
6. Stain each board
All except two of the boards are 10″x96″x1″ so the wall would end up right around the height that we wanted. We put it together with screws and deck hardware and that was it!

We LOVE how it turned out, and the best part is we can easily change out a board, paint it, or even make a set of boards that are shorter or wider depending on the size of our booth!

Thanks to Melissa for this shot of our booth at the Stevenson Ridge show! 🙂