I’m excited to share with you how we went from just drywall painted walls to some awesome shiplap for added texture to these spaces. If you are like me you will skip to the end to see the afters and bypass all of the befores, but I wanted to share some of the things that I learned to do and not to do during the ship lap process. It’s always nice to know the ins and outs of a project before starting it!
We started by going to Home Depot and picking out our plywood. Yes, we used plywood as a more budget friendly alternative. I was actually very impressed with the look after the paint. What a wonderful husband I have. He helped me from beginning to the end on this project. We cut our boards at 7 7/16 for a 9 foot ceiling with about 2 inches of trim at the bottom, but I advise you measure your wall and cut the boards appropriately for your wall space. We also made sure that the plywood that we were buying was not thicker than our trim. The sweet guys at Home Depot cut all of this plywood for us. Just make sure you use the right guy because one of them charged us for the cuts and the other one didn’t.
Supplies:
Liquid nails (we used on really warped boards)
Nickels
Paint
Jigsaw for small cuts around outlets and light switches
Drywall or Wood filler for holes
Homeward bound with our our plywood in the back of our shaggin wagon…I mean our 500 year old van, I mean our sweet vehicle that still runs. 🙂
After we trashed our place and put up the constuction zone signs…we started in full bore! We had to make sure all of my decor was off of the walls, and then sealed the holes that we knew we would not reuse. The mistake we made here was not marking my shelf holes that I had previously, forcing me to redrill new holes after the shiplap was installed.
Here we go…there is no turning back now. Make sure all of your studs are marked all the way down the wall so you know exactly where to place your nails. And I pity the poor people that ever try to take this off. They better have a lot of hole filler. Just make sure when you are starting at the top of the ceiling that you make your boards level. Don’t trust the wall or ceiling to be level. Our ceiling was in no way shape or form, level for this job. But with our trusty leveling tool, it turned out great!
We used nickels to space the boards to allow for a gap in between. And hint: it’s nice to have a pocket full of nickels for when you drop the first 5 and you are standing on a ladder with a nail gun. 🙂 And if you have never used a nail gun before…it’s loud when the air compressor turns on. Just a warning as I might have almost peed myself a couple of times.
Mistake number one that we made was not painting the inside of the boards before nailing them into the studs. The old wall color was showing through and I had to use some spray paint and a tiny little paint brush to get into the crevices. Yes, I was almost high afterwards but luckily it wore off quickly. I’m thankful that I noticed this when we only had half of one of the walls completed. We then went back and painted all of the sides of the plywood and made sure that the wall that would show through was painted the same color.
After I fixed the first wall, filled in all of the holes with drywall filler, and sanded all of them it was smooth sailing from then on out. Minus all of the outlets that we had to cut around and the tidious cutting to affix the boards around the windows. My husband used a jigsaw to cut the boards to fit around the outlets and light switches. And, believe it or not, I even did one myself AND completed an entire wall all by myself. I’m pretty proud seeing as this was my first time that I had used a nail gun. To be honest, this is not a difficult job just very time consuming and tidious! I would do it all over again for the beautiful end product!
Enough with the before pictures, here is the big reveal. I couldn’t be happier, I just LOVE the end result! It adds so much more farmhouse texture to our suburban home! I would love to hear what you think!
These shelves are super budget friendly too. The tutorial can be found here…
I painted this chandelier with my DIY chalk paint recipe here…
Thanks for stopping by! I hope that we can meet up on Instagram and Facebook as well! Have a great week friends!
Affiliate links are used in this post to assist you in finding supplies and home decor used. I only use products that I trust.
Beautiful! I’m going to do one wall now. Love that Chester was in the final reveal.
That’s awesome! I would love to see it when you are finished!
Wow , i love it ! Looks wonderful.
Also love your headboard diy..
See you on IG,
Greetings from Holland !
Sandra
Thank you so much!! Yes see you on IG! 🙂
This is so beautiful! I am getting ready to try this in my office……..one question….how did you do the corner joints?
Sorry I’m just seeing this, we didn’t really have joints, just flat edges
Curious as to which plywood you used if you remember. Did it say sanded, did you sand it, or keep a rough texture? Ours is so rough in the laundry room we had to sand it once it was put up and it’s still rough. Is it supposed to look that rustic? I am considering using msg for the rest. Don’t want luan/underlayment bc I want them thick and sturdy.
We just used the normal plywood, it’s not without texture but not super rough either. I sanded it down to keep it from being so splintery but that didn’t take much sanding.
Do you remember how thick your plywood is?
Hi Christa, I’m not sure about the plywood width, I’ sorry. It’s probably 1/4″ I’m guessing.
Looks great! Thanks so much for sharing the ins and outs. Makes me more confident to try my own DIY shiplap.
Yay so fun!! ????????