Walking around the Meatpacking District a while back, we spotted this weirdly beautiful door to an under-construction building:  rough, completely utilitarian, cheap (actually warped) plywood painted silver -possibly using the silvery paint meant to seal metal. It’s one of those surprise transformations of an ordinary material that we find both heartening and thought-provoking (and why we love walking around New York)…

…wonder who did it?….

…wonder what we can do with the idea?

Then we came across a waferboard wall on the side of a building. (Waferboard, also known as Orient Strand Board is a cheap, rather homely building material that looks like flat shards of wood pressed together into a sheet.) It was painted dark chocolate brown, which transformed the texture of waferboard into surprising chic. We’re sorry we didn’t have the presence of mind to snap a picture.

Soon after, we stumbled on this waferboard chair published on  on Rolu, with some of the chips painted dark. Beautiful.

We love our unexpected recent lessons in the possibilities inherent in cheapo materials we’d previously written-off: VISION CHANGE. All it took was a little paint.

Related posts: d-i-y stylish stools made of random wood scraps
color-painted panels as decorative element
what a painted slab of plywood can do (d-i-y)
strategy: cool un)plywood storage cabinets