Driving home today I was telling my husband I need to hurry home and update my blog about how I did the shiplap wall in our house. This was his response,"Why are you just giving away that info for free." Well you know why? It's because I've so appreciated people who have been willing to share FREE info with me. I'm a stay at home mom who loves to decorate and to do all things cute but I don't have a lot of extra money to spend on that stuff (and let's be honest my husbands turned me into a tight wad like him<insert cringe emoji here>. Ok back to the shiplap.........
First things first. My husband brought to my attention--very kind and jokingly---after my post about self-reliance that he did do the math to figure out how wide the strips of shiplap needed to be and how many I would need to finish the wall. So I give credit where credit is due;) like I said he is a good egg. We needed a 4x8' sheet 3/8ths" sanded plywood from Lowes *P.S. when I called Home Depot they said they cant rip anything down smaller than 12'* which cost $15.39 and they cut the strips for free. If you want large amounts cut I'm not sure if it's still free or not. That would be something you would want to check into. By all means have them cut them down for you unless you have a large saw that will hold a sheet of plywood. We have tried ripping them down ourselves with the table saw and it's next to impossible to cut the strips perfectly straight. Which then causes problems when hanging the shiplap on the walls and is a huge nightmare.... just trust me! I needed each strip to be 5 7/8ths" wide by 4' wide. Speaking from personal experience here and I'm not trying to be rude, but as I said my PERSONAL experiences with Lowes and Home Depots --and I've spent ALOT of time in both-- just because they work there does not mean they know much about what they are doing at all. The sweet young man (yikes that kind of makes me sound old saying young man...I'm really not that old guys, only 25) that helped me did not know what 5 7/8ths was and I had to help him set the saw to the right measurements.
This is how they looked after. This is how yours will look as well. It's not anything they did, it's just how plywood cuts, unless cut with a chop saw.
Now to prep the wall. Since shiplap has gaps you will want to paint a coat of white paint on the wall you are shiplapping. It doesn't have to be perfect as you can see:
I put a glove on and rubbed off all the splinters off the plywood.If you want to use a sander to knock them down, that's ok too. Again, doesn't have to be perfect. I chose to have the side with no splinters as the part that will face out and be what I see. I also like to paint the shiplap before putting it on the wall. If you don't want to that's ok but at least paint the edges, because it's much easier before you put it on than after trying to paint in each crack to cover up the wood color. Once painted I used 1" brad nails to secure the shiplap to the wall. I read on Pinterest once -I wish I knew the source so I could give credit- to use nickels as spacers between shiplap. It works perfectly.
Once the shiplap was hung I like to use silicon to touch up any spaces or imperfections ( kind of like you do with trim). Then I touched up paint ,cleaned up supplies and started planning how I was going to decorate it. From start to finish it took me about 3 hours. The hardest part about the wall was cutting around the receptacle.. ok it's not that hard, more just time consuming. Since we are being honest here...... I did cut the hole a little to large for the receptacle cover and I didn't want to have to recut it so I just went and bought and oversized receptacle cover from the local hardware store for $1.20.
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