Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

*This post features gifted product from Loloi. Thanks for supporting the brands who help make fresh content possible here on Dream Green DIY!

Lately, I’ve been talking here on the blog about how I’m trying to be more intentional with my design choices at home, and a big part of that concept is centered on rugs. Yes, rugs are considered décor, but they’re also very much about function in our house, both from a comfort standpoint (ex. having something soft to stand on at the kitchen sink) and to protect our floors.

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

The last couple of years I’ve been sort of experimental with rugs. I’ve gone bold more often than not, and mixed very different styles next to each other to satisfy my desire to make our home stand out from the crowd. Now, though, I’m feeling drawn toward parring things back and going a little bit more classic as opposed to bold. I want to invest in rugs that I know we’ll have for the long haul and that feel cohesive all throughout our home.

SIDE NOTE: I doubt I’ll be perfect when it comes to this goal because I genuinely adore change (especially when it comes to home décor), but I’m going to try my hardest to stick with it. Rugs are hard to move around!

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

The way I’m doing this (bringing cohesion to our home through rugs) is by actually buying the exact same rug for multiple rooms in our house, just in different sizes or even shapes—think: rectangular vs. round. Take our guest room and dining room for example. We just recently ordered a pair of Loloi Theia Area Rugs in Granite/Ivory for both of these rooms, but one is the 7′-10″ x 10′ rectangular size, and the other is a 7′-10″ round. The rooms are on opposite sides of the house from each other, so they don’t feel too “matchy-matchy,” but the repeated pattern and colors helps unify the front and back of our home as you walk from space to space.

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Another rug I’m using for this concept is the Loloi II Layla area rug in Spice/Marine. Ever since purchasing this rug on my own several years ago, I’ve been smitten. The colors are so rich and vibrant, and are the perfect complement to the soothing color palette we’ve chosen for our bedroom (seen pictured below). To help make that 7′-6″ x 9′-6″ rug feel more cohesive throughout our house, I bought the smaller 2′-3″ x 3′-9″ size of the exact same rug to go in our bathroom. I actually bought another version of that small rug last week for our kitchen sink because I love it so much.

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

Anyway, I’m sure you get the idea! Don’t shy away from repeating the same exact rug throughout your house. If you choose rooms that have different functions (like a bedroom and a kitchen) to put the matching rugs in, they’ll naturally feel unique based on the different types of colors and furniture you surround them with. I don’t think you would even notice that we had matching rugs when walking through our home because the size and shape differences fool the eye, but still manage to bring a sense of cohesion to the house.

Painting Our Kitchen Window Trim White

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

The other benefit of doing this is that, once you find a rug you love, you can shop with total confidence. The Theia rug I mentioned before is probably the nicest rug we’ve ever owned. It’s super, super soft, and although it looks mostly neutral from far away, the colors are actually really layered and rich up close. It’s the type of rug that you want to sit down on to fully enjoy. And the Layla area rug has long been a favorite of mine for that warm vintage-inspired pattern it has. I have zero qualms about having it three times over on the same floor of our house! Would you try this trick in your house? Let me know in the comments.

Adding Cohesion To Your Home With Rugs

*I earn a small percentage from purchases made using the affiliate links above. Affiliate links are not sponsored. Rest assured that I never recommend products we wouldn’t use or don’t already love ourselves.

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DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

*This post was sponsored by Woodstock Walls. All opinions are my own.

Ever since launching Dream Green DIY 10 years ago (and long before that personally, too) my mission has been to reuse and recycle what already exists in the world to make our house beautiful. I’m far from perfect when it comes to that goal, but I do my best, and I think it has had such a big impact on our home. Our spaces feel really one-of-a-kind to us, and each room is filled with things that we’ve purchased secondhand or that we’ve made by reusing materials we already had.

I’ve been speeding my way through makeover after makeover this past year as my way of mentally and physically dealing with the fact that I’ve been stuck at home, but I can feel myself settling again. I’m planning room refreshes with more intention, and driving my decisions based on function as opposed to form alone. One big change I decided to make this month was in my office.

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

It might be hard to tell through a camera lens, but my home office is on the smaller side. It also gets barely any natural light (only for about an hour and a half right before sunset). I love the original stained wood trim throughout our home, but it does make the rooms feel a little closed-in, especially the rooms that have big stained wood closet doors in them—like my office.

Keeping in mind my mission this year to repurpose beautiful accents that are already available (not mass-produced), I decided to do a reclaimed wood feature wall in my office that would go up and around the big stained closet doors. That way, the wood texture would feel more thought-out and the closet would blend into the reclaimed wood panels. The wood panel treatment would also make this already-dark room feel intentionally moody and rich, traits that I’ve wanted this room to have but I haven’t been able to figure out how to achieve it up until now.

For this project, I teamed up with Woodstock Walls, who ship 100 percent reclaimed wood panels to creative homeowners looking to add (sustainable!) character to their spaces. Keep scrolling to get the scoop, including before/after photos and a tutorial video.

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

First of all, let’s talk about the wood. I’ve always been a huge fan of wood texture in a home (probably because my dad is a professional woodworker), and we have a lot of it in our home. I’m of the opinion that all wood goes together, whether it’s dark brown, red, orange, or whatever! Wood grain is a neutral in my opinion, so when I was thinking about sourcing material for the reclaimed wood feature wall in my office, I was pretty open-minded about it.

Woodstock Walls sends free samples, so I went ahead and started there. While I stick to my claim of being especially open-minded about this project, I did want to find a wood tone that was in the general family of the stained wood closet doors in my office so they would blend in. After checking over the samples and getting John’s opinion, we landed on their Rustic Mill panels since those had a hint of warmth throughout that would complement the closet doors. The Rustic Mill panels are their authentic barn wood panels that come as a tongue-and-groove application.

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

After making my final materials choice and placing the order, product arrived about 10 days later. I appreciate how fast their shipping is because when I set my mind on a project, I want to get it done now! Shipping is also always free (it’s built into the price of the material), so that was a nice bonus, too.

Since I filmed an entire how-to video of the installation process, I thought I’d write just a quick bullet list of how to pull this project off. If you have questions, check out the video, or reach out to Woodstock Walls. Their customer service is really stellar, and they can help you through any roadblocks you might run into (although I doubt you will have any).

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

How To Install Reclaimed Woodstock Walls Panels:

1. Stack the wood panels in a square or rectangular shape on the floor with space between so that air can flow through. This allows the wood to acclimate to your home, and helps avoid shrinkage or expansion after installation. Allow the wood to acclimate for 72 hours before getting started.

2. Turn your first panel over and squeeze a 2-inch line of adhesive in all four corners and in the center of the panel. There are grooves in the back of the wood panel to make this easier. Just squeeze adhesive right into the grooves.

3. While the adhesive is still wet, press the panel up on the wall at baseboard height. You’ll have 1-3 minutes before the adhesive starts to set, so you have time to adjust the board until it’s just right on your wall. If the panel is a little on the longer side length-wise, you might need to hold the board in place for 30 seconds or so.

4. Continue the process across your entire wall, using a hand saw or compound miter saw to trim the panels as needed to fill up the space. Since all of the reclaimed wood panels from Woodstock Walls are real and sourced from all over America, you’ll find lots of variation in color and texture with your boards. Mix different lengths next to each other and different colors, too, so that your wall has a well-balanced look overall. Step back often to see how things are looking, that way you know what type of board to pick next. If installing horizontally, it’s also important to stagger your joint lines to achieve a sturdier wall.

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

The Woodstock Walls Click & Stick method (that is, the pre-measured grooves on the back of the panels that take the perfect amount of adhesive for applying the wood to the wall) is what makes this process so straightforward. It’s a pretty permanent application, but I don’t see myself changing this feature wall any time soon, so I was very confident using the application process they recommended. By the way, they offer a full supply kit on their website for the Click & Stick method. If you want an alternative, though, you can use a nail gun.

Oh, and as a personal aside, I wanted to mention that I showed how to hand-saw the panels for application in the video, which you absolutely can do, but I would definitely recommend using a compound miter saw if you can. It depends on the size of your project, but I had to make dozens of cuts, and my power saw helped speed up the process significantly. I was able to complete my feature wall installation entirely on my own in about three hours.

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

Click “Play” above to watch the video I recorded, that way you can see the process in action, and don’t hesitate to let me know here in the comments if you have questions. I’m absolutely in love with how things turned out, and I’m excited to start making new memories with my wood wall as a backdrop. I feel like my whole office has been made over, from top to bottom, even though I just added the reclaimed barn wood to one small wall in the room.

I’m sitting here right now at my desk typing up this story and can’t help but turn and look at the wall. How cool to think that the wood for this project came all the way from an American barn to end up in my office—it’s like I’m reclaiming those memories to build new ones of my own. The wall is so striking (maybe even more so in person), and is the perfect way for me to celebrate my love for wood texture and reclaimed materials in a home. Click here to learn more about Woodstock Walls, and start planning your own DIY reclaimed wood décor project.

DIY Reclaimed Wood Feature Wall Tutorial | dreamgreendiy.com + @WoodstockWallsCo #ad

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