The Shiplap Reveal!!!

Hi Friends! I’m going to share with you how we went from just drywall painted wall to some awesome textured shiplap. 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 (the second time we had to go back and get more cut). Just kidding…really they were both very kind.

 

Supplies:

Nail gun

Nails for gun

Liquid nails (we used on really warped boards)

Level

Nickels

Paint

Brushes and rollers

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, lol!

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for stopping by! I hope that we can meet up on Instagram and Facebook as well! Have a great week friends!