Building the floating wall: the final touches.

We finally finished the wall. It's been a fun project together, mistakes and all. The only thing left is filling all the tiny holes from the brad nailer. 

For the record, we absolutely love the wall. 

We love how it separates our bed from the rest of our room. We love how it nearly-completely blocks the morning sun. We love how it makes our bedroom feel cozier while keeping the room open. A friend was here yesterday and remarked how we're surrounded by views out all of our windows so it's nice to have a space where there isn't so much stimulation. A place that feels calm and private.

The wall turned out pretty much exactly like we imagined, and like I had sketched.

This photo of a kitchen had been our inspiration:

The dark grey we had already painted behind our bed so that was an easy match. The wood trim was what we liked for a built-in shelf.

We also wanted the wall to blend into the room. Uhh, a tall order for an eight-foot-tall monolith standing in the middle of it. Still, to do that we painted the baseboard trim the same color as the wall. It's a look that we're interested in for the rest of the house. This made a great test piece.

Before it could be finished, we had some work to do. Quite a bit, in fact. Starting with fixing my drywall mudding mistake. I worked at night after K placed our Truth Light on the top of the wall. That angle showed the mistake, seen below as the shadow running lengthwise to the right of me.

I filled in underneath it with more mud. Then sanded.

It wasn't perfect, but it was really good. Without a 500-lumen lamp shining directly on it, the wall looked seamless. It was time to be done with mudding. I repainted the living side to match the middle grey on our bedroom walls, Valspar 4004-2a Grey Suit.

Then it was time to switch gears to finish carpentry. Not my strong suit. It's fun, though, and I got to break out a bunch of power tools. Most notably, my table saw and router table.

The pieces of trim began piling up in our bedroom.

The plan was to use 1/4" plywood and wrap the wall on both sides and on the top. The same for the built-in shelf. I mitered all of it.

We had picked up a 4x8' sheet of maple 1/4" plywood at Lowe's. For the vertical sides and back of the built-in shelf, however, I used scrap 1/4" luan ply from our Sprinter van build.

For the 3/4" strips, I broke out a solid maple miter box I found at a garage sale years ago.

Trying to miter thin strips of 1/4" plywood was sort of dangerous on my power miter saw. Cutting it by hand worked perfectly. Oh, like she tends to do, K made me coffee while I was in the thick of all that.

To get the shelf just right and as square as possible, I used drywall shims behind the wood before nailing everything in place.

The rest of the installation was pretty straightforward. I'd nail as much as needed to get the edging flush to the end pieces.

When all the trim was mounted, I pieced together and mitered the baseboard. Oh, I painted it ahead of time so I didn't have to worry about masking off the wood floor.

Then caulked along where it met the wall on both sides. Lots of sanding along the mitered edges and the rest of the trim. Lots of sanding. Finally, I varnished the bare wood with Minwax Polycrylic in a matte finish (because we tested it and that clear lacquer won the test of yellowing bare wood the least).

With that, then, our wall was basically finished.

Coming down the hallway, since our bedroom is at a slight angle from the rest of the house, we get a sliver of a profile. It's kind of cool.

In the late afternoon, with the sun coming in from the west (the side of the wall our bed is situated), the difference in light and dark is pretty evident.

Yep, we really like it. As I said just starting this post, it's been a fun project that used a lot of our skills… and then some. Namely, having to figure out how to engineer the thing not to topple over and kill us while we slept. Heck, I'm no pro at framing but was pretty impressed with how this went together. Now I just need to build the frame for the photograph we printed and hang it above the built-in shelf.

Onto our next project…

ps… That morning we woke up (surprise!) to snow. The day before got up into the mid-60s, then, by the time we were putting Sefton to sleep there were ginormous snowflakes swirling in the wind…

pps… Our neighbor is a general contractor and owns his own construction business. When he was over checking out our wall, I asked him how much he'd have bid on this project. '$1500-2000,' he said. His wife was standing next to him and laughed out loud. 'So you mean $3-4,000, then?' she said with a smile. Picking any of those dollar amounts, we feel pretty good having done it ourselves.