Fancy Wall

Well, here we are at the big moment. I am sure everyone is just bristling with anticipation for what this is going to be. The mystery product is called ModularArts wall panel systems (http://modulararts.com/#3), and I have put this up where the fireplace used to be as an accent piece for the house. I have been dying to see this up for almost three solid months now, and its finally up and pretty ready to be painted.

The installation of this tile was a point of concern over the past month or so. Much of the reason why it was so delayed going up was that I was not sure I had the right person to install it. There are not any specific directions for installation in the sense that it really is meant to be installed a lot the way drywall is. There are 8 pre-drilled holes in each tile and they also come with pre-notched edges that allow them to connect together when they are intsalled. In the end I chose to use the finish carpenter (thanks Gene) to do the installation, and the drywaller (thanks Lorenzo/Omar) fill in the spaces between the tiles and sand it down. Whats really nice about the product is that it came with everything I needed to get it put together and looking like one solid unit all the way down to the sandpaper they wanted me to use to sand the spackle they provided. Pretty interesting stuff.

ModularArts calls this a dimensional wall surface, and I think this picture shows thats it definitely has a ton of depth and variation. One of the main reasons that I decided to do this on this wall space was that it looks like drywall. The wall panels are 32" x 32" and are made of the same thing as drywall - pressurized gypsum. This entire idea came about once I realized that we were going to have to take out the fireplace and chimney. We have been dead set on not having the TV be on the wall space in the middle room due to the relative thin size of the room and the fact that it alienates the front room of the house effectively making it useless. SO, we decided that it made sense to have the front room be the TV room for the main floor and to have the middle room be a library of sorts.

This gives you an idea of the size of the wall in the space. The wall is 11' long and 9' high. One of my biggest concerns about this product on the wall was that it was going to make the wall look big and bulky and make the middle space in the house feel constrained. I was happy to see once it was installed that it was not in fact bulky at all and has a very nice streamlined feel to it. In the coming days we will be priming and painting this. The current thought process is to paint it a very glossy white to really help showcase the contour of the wall. I am interested to see what this looks like without the paper on the floor etc....soon enough we will see.