Painted Wall Hook…”Thingy”

Remember when I posted my laundry room REVEAL and I said I would be right back with a tutorial on how I made this hook piece?

Yeah, sorry about that. But I am going to show you today how I created this piece and gave it a beach weathered look. I knew I wanted to attach wood to the wall to give the hooks more stability but didn’t want to do a bead board or batten treatment. I decided to run boards vertically rather than horizontally to add to the height of the room. I wanted to go a full six feet high with it and found 4” wide boards in a 12 foot length. I had the nice gentleman at Lowe’s cut them down to 6 feet so I didn’t have to do any cutting (it was cheaper to buy the longer boards and have them cut than to buy the 6 foot boards).
I didn’t sand the boards at all because I wanted them to have a rough texture. On this project I used inexpensive acrylic paints that I picked up at the local craft store. I enlisted the 2 year old to help me paint. He squirted the paint on each board and I smoothed it out. We gave each board two coats of paint to make sure the board was saturated with color. I was going for a bright “beachy” look so I chose colors that were bright.

I thought I wanted red to mix in with the other colors, but after it had its first coat I repainted with a soft blue which I liked a whole lot better.
After the boards dried I used some white acrylic paint to dry bush each board. Dry brushing means you load the paint brush up with paint lightly, then wipe some of it off by “painting” on some paper towel until you have just a little bit left on the brush. Then lightly paint it on to the board. Think putting on blush: the lighter the hand, the better. As the paint brush lightly goes over the board the grain of the wood should magically appear. It’s so fun! Almost like coloring in those invisible ink pages when I was little.

After everything dried, I placed the boards face down on the driveway and used a metal brace to hold them all together. I screwed several screws into each metal brace, holding the boards together from the back.  I didn’t glue them together because I wanted it to be a little imperfect and my boards weren’t perfect either.

I found the studs in the wall and attached the whole thing to the wall with some anchors and screws. I then screwed the hooks into the wood piece giving each hook quite a bit of strength.

Lastly, I found this great beach inspired wall plaque at T.J. Maxx. Believe it or not, I found this after I had installed the whole thing. The colors ended up being perfect. I love the bright and cheerful look in my laundry room.
The look of this can change so easily with different colors of paints. Have you done a project using this dry brush technique?  Did you love the results?