Decorative Wall

For over the last 3 years I've been totally bugged by our long entry way wall. NOTHING seemed to fit on it or look right on it. I though the solution would be some cast iron decorative wall hanging. WRONG. Then I thought that maybe I'd print a HUGE panoramic canvas of my photography. NOT. Totally didn't happen, plus it would have looked weird. So... last year I decided to make an awesome decorative coat rack/shelf! I've seriously loved it! Now when clients come in, they can hang up their jackets and bags. It looks so nice too. But, sadly, for the life of me I cannot find the pictures I took while we were building it. So I apologize about that, but at least I have a pretty after shot for you! It's an awkward skinny hallway, so it was super hard to get a great shot.. and impossible to get a shot from straight on.

It was a pretty tough process for us because the studs weren't where we wanted to put the boards. If we did, it wouldn't have been evenly centered on our wall. Our solution for this was getting a large board of MDF and screw it on the wall into the studs. This way, we could screw anywhere on the wall and it would be secured to the MDF board. From there we had to do a crazy amount of math to make each board evenly spaced. We drew on the wall several times and somehow kept getting it wrong! :P But we finally managed to get it figured out!

If this is something you'd like to do, here are the supplies we got!
The boarder around the sides, top, bottom and center (going horizontally) are 5.5 inch boards. The vertical slats are 2.5 inches as well as the "shelf" up on the top. We got a 2 inch decorative trim to put under the shelf. We used drywall mud to fill in the screw holes and on the exposed side where all the wood was screwed to the wall. We also got our hooks from Homedepot but after the fact I saw that Target had some cuter ones that didn't stick out as long. So far there hasn't been an issue of anyone bumping into it or getting stuck to a hook.
I decorated it with some of my own art and our family photos. I think it turned out super cute and was JUST what this wall needed! We get so many compliments :)

And just in case you were wondering. Our wall is 9.625 feet long. From the floor to the top of the shelf our decorative wall piece is 70 inches tall.