DIY Cork Board

Hey, hey! So are you–like so many others–getting organized in 2016? I love this time of year. Hardly anything makes me happier than organizing. It’s a sickness. So my latest organizing goal was my desk. You may recall that we turned a closet into a mini-office awhile back, and whoa. It’s been a game changer. I spend hours upon hours in this space. But the small bulletin board I hung there wasn’t cutting it. I really need a whole wall for my notes and reminders, so I decided to make a cork board wall. Cork is trendy. I thought it would look nice and modern.

Wrong. It looked awful! I used rolls of cork and even though I bought the thickest they had, it kept tearing and I couldn’t get the seams to lay flat no matter how hard I tried. Exhibit A and B…

In hindsight, the cork tiles may have been easier, but there was still a lot of cutting around corners and stuff that would’ve made them hard to install. Painting my mess wouldn’t have solved the problem because the seams were still awful. So, I decided to cover all of the cork with fabric. Thankfully, this project turned out to be a happy mistake because I like the final result better.

First, I centered my fabric on the cork wall, making sure I had enough yardage to cover the width and height of the area to be covered. Then I tacked the fabric up using push pins, and cut around the shelving.

After tacking and cutting all the way around (this took patience), I had a pattern roughly the size of my cork wall. (Please excuse the grainy photos. Not sure what happened there.)

Next, I ironed the fabric and tacked it up in the middle once more, this time using nailhead trim along the edge for a finished look. Once I had the fabric secured along the top, I lifted up the bottom of the fabric and sprayed adhesive directly onto the cork, smoothing the fabric down over top. This got rid of any wrinkling and created a nice smooth surface. I then finished off the remaining edges with the nailhead trim. Voila!