Shape Up or Ship(lap) Out
Yall… I’ve been wanting to shiplap a wall in my home for at least 3 years now. Us. The people who refinish things for everyone else. Well, I’ve been on maternity leave and decided it was now or never. Between our refinishing business and me working full time as a nurse and homeschooling our other child this year (#covid), we never have time to do anything for ourselves. Well… my maternity leave allowed that opportunity. So we shaped up and got the Shiplap out! 🙂
Now let me start by saying all those blogs and pinterest pins you see saying “I shiplapped my wall for $30” or “How to shiplap your wall for $75” are all BS. Let me tell you why… those people already had all the supplies to do it laying around the house clearly. Because the only way you can shiplap a wall for $30 is if you get free paint, have all the plywood just sitting in your garage waiting to be used, have tools and even the nails to adhere it already in your possession. In that case, you can just run to Starbucks and grab yourself and your hubby a latte and cream cheese danish and in fact spend the $30 they claim to have only spent on shiplapping a room in their home.
Now that I have that out of the way, let’s get down to it. I made 4 trips to Home Depot. And I spent around $500 total. But… we had extra supplies left over. Since I was on maternity leave, we decided we would borrow some scaffolding from a dear friend of mine (Thanks Weldon!) and paint our bedroom and paint and shiplap our living room while we had it. We also thought we’d do this in 3-4 days. Well I don’t know if you know this or not… but it is in fact very difficult to do any kind of home improvement project with a brand new baby. I mean, I’d feed him, rock him, finally get him to sleep, pump, gather my supplies and he’d just about wake up again. LOL. My poor hubby… he had to do a lot of work alone with me cheering him on from the floor.
So, how’d I spend so much money you ask. Well first, I had to paint my walls before I could even start. I read that if your walls are a darker color underneath than the color you’re painting the shiplap, that dark color will show through the gaps in between the shiplap. And because we planned on painting eight 16 foot high walls, we bought a 5 gallon bucket of paint ($145). Remember how I said it’s hard to do a project with a new baby… well we ended up stopping after just doing the living room and shiplap wall because it was just too much. So we had extra paint leftover. I already had a Ryobi Airstrike but did end up buying a backup battery ($75) because we forgot and left the charger at our shop 15 miles away and Home Depot is only 2 miles from my house –> a blessing and a curse. We already had the saws as well. I ended up purchasing a Kreg Rip-Cut Circular Saw Guide to rip the plywood ourselves because the young man at Home Depot didn’t know what he was doing when I asked him to rip it for me and jacked up (yes it’s a saying) one of my sheets. It’s a shame because it would’ve saved us a whole day off our overall time. The saw guide worked great, however, and our plywood cuts came out less damaged than any cuts that young man was gonna make.
For our wood, we decided to go with 1/4 sanded plywood. Now I don’t know if you’ve been to the hardware store recently or not, but even the lower end of plywood is more than what every blog I read quoted it at. We purchased ours for $22.92 a sheet. We got 7 sheets but ended up with extra ($173).
Here’s how it all went down…
Day 1: We brought all that plywood home and laid it out on plastic in the driveway so we could prep it. We know from experience that pine wood can bleed in time and I didn’t want my pretty white walls to turn yellow. I started by shellacing all the knots in the plywood because I know they can be troublesome. I used Bin Zinsser Shellac ($15 a quart) for this. As I was applying this with a brush, my hubby was getting the primer ready. We primed all the boards with two coats of Kilz Premium Primer ($25 a gallon). This was thinned down with water and sprayed on with our HomeRight Super Max paint sprayer.
Now some of you may think this is overkill but I highly recommend doing it the right way the first time to prevent yellowing later… especially if you are painting your shiplap white. The fun part was trying to find room in the garage that night at 9pm to place 7 eight foot tall sheets of plywood because it still hadn’t dried yet. It was a cold December night for Georgia and it wasn’t helping my drying time.
Day 2: We began by taping off all our trim and the opposing walls (different color paint) using our favorite tape, Scotch 3m blue painter’s tape. Once we got all that prep work done, we laid some plastic down to protect our flooring and got to painting our walls. We painted 2 coats on our plain wall and one coat on our wall that we were adding the shiplap to. We used Behr premium paint in a satin finish in Ultra Pure White because I wanted a bright white with no undertones. FYI Behr provides great coverage if you’ve never used it before. We applied this using rollers and extra long arms (remember I said we had 16 foot ceilings) and even tied an angled paint brush to a long wooden scrap piece of board to paint near the ceiling. Yup, you heard that right. We had to use one level of scaffolding to reach the top with a roller and would’ve had to add a second level to paint it correctly (and neatly) without the stick. I highly recommend the stick if you like your neck unbroken. Personally, I’m too smart to climb up on 2 stories of scaffolding at this point in my life. I think we called it quits around 2 am. (It took 2 days to paint and we finished it on day three). I’ll be honest… after seeing how high up the hubby was on that one level of scaffolding, we almost backed out on the shiplap all together. I gave him an out and told him if he just wanted to finish the painting and call it quits, I was ok with it. There was no way I was going to get on two levels of scaffolding and so I couldn’t expect him to either. We decided to sleep on it.
Day 3: We stared at the wall that morning trying to decide if we were gonna finish what we started and hang shiplap or not. Being that I really wanted a shiplap wall and we had already purchased and primed all the plywood AND being that we both liked our necks unbroken… I came up with a compromise. I love a good compromise, don’t you? I decided we would go 3/4 the way up the wall and hang some trim to dress it out. So after breakfast and getting the baby to sleep, we started ripping all that plywood that the Home Depot boy struggled with. The hubby used his new Rip Guide ($35) to set the width we were cutting the boards and he cut while I held and kept the boards from falling causing them to tear and shred (which is what the HD boy forgot to do). We used a circular saw (Porter Cable from Lowes) and 7 1/2 Diablo blade for this. We cut them at 5 7/8″ which gave us 7 boards at this width and one that was wider. We got our mojo going after the 1st board and it was a piece of cake. Once cut, we sanded all the edges down to smooth them and remove any splinters created with the saw. For this we just used a sanding block and some sandpaper. We finished painting this day too and, once dry, used a stud finder and chalk line ($7) to mark all our studs in the wall so we’d know where to nail the boards.
Day 4: Time to lay some shiplap. The wall we decided to shiplap is crazy. It has a cut out on each side for doorways and they are both different in height and width. This causes the angle where the ceiling starts to be at different heights from the top of each doorway. We also have a ceiling with a straight area (not just a typical triangle shape)… so we have more angles there. These all required the use of an angle finder ($24) when we got ready to cut boards for them. What this means is that we had lots of cuts. We started at the bottom of the wall and worked our way up. The middle of my wall between the two doorways is 10 feet and 1/4 inch long. I know right, why can’t it be an even 8 or 12?!?! We decided to alternate with an 8 foot board and a 2 1/4″ length board. We used a Miter saw to cut the lengths.
Angle Finder
Starting on the left side, we held an 8′ board in place and nailed it with our Airstrike once we made sure it was level. Beside that, we laid a 2′ 1/4″ board. The next row (starting on that same left side), we first placed a 2′ 1/4″ board followed by an 8′ board. We used nickels to place in between the rows to provide our gap. Again, nail in place once level. We continued up the wall alternating which length we started with first. This allowed our seams to be in the same place every other board and is aesthetically pleasing in my opinion. We stopped when we reached the height of the doorways… at 2 am again.
chalk line markings
Day 5: Once we got above the doorways, our wall was much wider and required more boards. Because we didn’t want to lose the layout of seams we had just created, we planned our cuts so that it allowed the seams to remain in the same place. This will differ for everyone based on the width of your wall so I can’t advise you on this without knowing it. Just think about it in advance if you have multiple doorways or windows on your wall.
At the area where the wall meets the ceiling, we used the angle finder to determine the angle and then simply marked and cut each board accordingly using a Jig saw. Because we decided we weren’t going all the way to the top of the ceiling, we were almost done. Our battery ran out on the Airstrike when we had 2 rows left. I ran to Home Depot for a backup battery because it was closer than driving to the shop to get ours. And who doesn’t need a backup battery anyway, right? Bonus… it was on sale so I got 2 for $70 (they normally cost $90 each). As soon as I got back home with the battery, I thought “dang, I should’ve gotten the trim”. So I went back to Home Depot and purchased 20 feet of Base Cap Moulding @ $0.97 per linear foot ($21.40). We got to a stopping point on shiplap and nailed the trim in place. It was perfect! I didn’t prime it because I wanted to be done. Fingers crossed it doesn’t bleed later. We slapped 2 coats of paint on the newly hung shiplap and called it done! We couldn’t be happier with the result. It is bright and airy and cleaner looking in this room and now has a little character. To complete the look, we painted our living room furniture (a dresser that houses our giant TV and two side cabinets) in Dixie Belle Chalk Paint in Fluff. It’s the slightest bit different from the wall color and is the perfect compliment to it. Now, my living room looks like a whole new place! You can purchase your Dixie Belle paint with my affiliate link @ https://dixiebellepaint.com/?aff=452
Supplies:
24″ Kreg Rip-Cut Circular Saw Guide $34.97
1/4 Sanded Pine Plywood @ $22.92 each
Base Cap Moulding 11/16″ x 1 3/8″ pine trim @ $0.97 per linear foot
Ryobi Airstrike Finish Nailer
Nails. (18 gauge brad nail @ 1 1/2 inch).
Circular Saw, Miter Saw, Jig Saw.
Clamps
Paint: We used Behr in Ultra Pure White. 5 gallon bucket $134
Paint rollers (white woven) and Tele Roller long arm with handle
Bin Zinsser Clear Shellac $14.98/quart
Kilz Premium Primer $25/gallon
Scotch 3m Painter’s Tape
Level
Angle Finder (Husky Digital Sliding T-Bevel Angle Finder $24
Chalk Line $7
Stud Finder
Nickels to mark your gap between boards
