Duo Ventures: Sami's Big Boy Room: DIY Faux Shiplap Paneled Wall

Last week I posted about how we built Sami's DIY PBK inspired bed - this week I'm sharing how I installed an accent wall in his new room. I was 5 months pregnant when I worked on this project, so anyone can do this!

In 2014 we added an accent wall of board & batten in the nursery which I love, but I wanted to do something different for this room. I decided to go with a wall of faux shiplap (or paneling - whatever you want to call it). I know some people are already over this trend, but I'm a sucker for any sort of simple & clean wood trim work that adds character to your walls.

Here is the wall I was working with:

While some people panel their walls with tongue & groove boards (left), I chose to do the faux shortcut version using sheets of luan plywood. This is both a less expensive & lighter weight option to panel your walls.

Some stores will rip the luan plywood down for you in store, but we chose to do it at home on the table saw. The sheets are 4'x8', so I decided to rip each board to about 5 7/8" wide so that I could get a total of eight 8' boards out of each sheet of luan.

After all the boards were cut to size I lightly sanded all the edges down to removed any splinters.

Many of the tutorials I read online suggested painting the wall the color the shiplap was eventually going to be, or in the least, painting horizontal stripes along the wall where the seams would be. This is supposed to make the painting process easier in the end. I figured I could skip this step and just get in the seams with a brush once the boards were up.

Before I started attaching the boards to the wall, I had to determine how the boards would lay out on the wall. Some tutorials suggested cutting the boards so the ends would fall on one half of a stud. However, because I planned on using adhesive & nails, I wasn't too worried about making sure they lined up that way.

I put some liquid nails on the back of each board & stuck them on the wall. Then I quickly took the nail gun and added some 3" nails along the ends & edges of the boards. The liquid nails sets pretty quickly so you need to move quickly.

I started at the top left of the wall and just worked my way across & down. I chose to start at the top of the wall since I knew we would have to rip the bottom row of boards down to a thinner width & I preferred that they were at the bottom of the wall where they would be less visible.

You can see I was left with a seam in the middle & along the right end of the wall.

SIDE NOTE: Since the boards were about 3" too short to finish covering the right side of the wall, I had to cut a bunch of small pieces to complete it as you can see. That was not fun to putty and sand, let me tell you. Later on, when I was showing my dad the wall, he suggested I should have split the difference of the 3" gap and left a 1.5" gap on each end of the wall which I could have then covered up with a trim piece.....wish I would have thought of that. Just thought I should mention that in case you have a similar situation.

Anyway, since I was going for a more modern streamlined look I did not want the vertical seams showing, so I sanded, puttied, & sanded again until they were as smooth as possible. I also filled in all the nail holes at this point.

Next, I added a trim piece at the ceiling. Our ceilings are super uneven so even though the trim piece was relatively flexible, I had to do a fair amount of caulking to fill in some gaps.

Once I was done filling holes & caulking it was on to paint. I narrowed it down to two color options & painted them on some paper to get an idea of what they would look like in the space. I ended up choosing Flannel Grey by Behr.

I started out by painting all the seams with a brush. To be honest, it was more difficult than I thought it would be to get the paint in the cracks and cover the edges of the boards. I sort of lucked out because the original wall color was already a bluish color and the seams didn't stand out. However, I would recommend painting the wall beforehand (or maybe even the edges of the boards) if the wall color and future shiplap color are different colors