DIY Faux Shiplap

If you have followed along with me on Instagram you have probably heard that our house has sold so we are getting ready to move in at my parents while we build our house. My parents are sweet enough to let us move in and they were even sweeter to let us do some updates to the upstairs to make it feel homey. They added on the entire upstairs when my brother and I were younger so it still had the hot pink and orange walls and definitely needed a few small updates, which is what brought us to this DIY faux shiplap. We aren’t completely finished, but I have had soo many questions on materials and how tough it was to do so I wanted to go ahead and get this post up and then add to it as we finish up. Let me start and say I didn’t do any of the heavy lifting on this project. My husband and dad did all of the big work and I just did the painting. My dad is an excellent craftsman so all I really had to do was show him some pictures of what I wanted and he took it from there. He is seriously the best! I browsed through several pins on Pinterest but quickly got overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start so I just let my dad take it from there. So off we went to Home Depot at about 5:00 one evening to gather the supplies. My dad already had all of the big tools, so we just needed the materials to do the project.

These are the materials that we ended up going with:

• ¼ in thick underpayment plywood (there may be other options, but this is what we went with)
• Inside cove trim (you may or may not want this, my dad just said it would look more finished with this trim on the corners)
• Finishing nails (18 gauge, 1 ¾ long)
• Air nailer (I am sure you could use an alternative to this if you didn’t have one)
• Level
• Tape measurer
• Spacers
• Stud finder
• Pencil
• Saw
• Wood filler
• Sandpaper
• Primer
• Paint of your choice
• Paint brushes and roller

(We purchased everything from Home Depot.)

We got Home Depot to cut the plywood into 6 inch strips. On this part it is SUPER important to make sure they cut them all at 6 inches and it doesn’t change. Somehow the saw dropped a bit on a few cuts so the pieces were a tad bit smaller, which caused some issues when installing. The saw also caught on one cut and ended up kind of “chewing” up the edges of two strips, which for shiplap that wouldn’t work. The guy was super nice though and got an entire new board and cut replacements for the two messed up pieces. We were doing 3 areas so we got 4 pieces of plywood and had them all cut there to make it easier. My dad had the equipment to cut them into pieces, but the saw at Home Depot is much larger and took less time to cut them. Once we got home with our materials we got to work. Earlier that day I had primed the walls to cover up the hot pink and orange. You can see through the boards so it is important to cover any bright or dark colors that may be on the wall you are going to shiplap. The large bedroom wall had a light grey paint and we just left it without primer and you can’t tell at all, but the bright colors would have shown through. My dad and husband started by locating all of the studs in the walls with a stud finder. Then they drew the line down the wall to mark it. Since this was in the bathroom vanity area we started at the top so if any boards needed to be ripped it would be at the bottom and not the top, which would be less noticeable. I thought we would have started at the bottom, but my dad wanted to do the top in case boards needed to be cut to fit. He measured the length of the wall and then cut the first board to fit. We laid plastic down and got the vacuum out to help with any sawdust since he was cutting upstairs. My dad held the board up at the top of the wall with the level, which is when we realized the top of this wall was not perfectly level, which meant our first board had a little gap at the top left. We decided we would rather the boards be straight and not risk the entire wall being crooked, so we left the gap. My dad is going to possibly try to do some sort of trim piece to cover it, but since the wall is on a weird slant he may have to make his own trim piece to fit. Stay tuned for that. You can see the left side has a little bit of a gap. Once he got the board leveled and set in place he nailed it in. (Sorry, I didn’t get a picture of the first one getting nailed in.) After that he measured and cut the next board to go up. This is when the spacers come in. You can use anything really, but we had tile spacers from when my dad did a backsplash, so we used those. My husband helped out on this part, so two sets of hands are definitely helpful. Each person held a side and put a spacer in then they took turns nailing their side into place with the nail gun. After that they just kept doing the same thing all the way down. Once he got to the bottom he did have to cut out around the drains for the sink, but that wasn’t too bad. It would be about the same for cutting around outlets. (I didn’t really get anymore pictures as they went down because I was painting the vanity.) The picture below is from the bedroom wall we did exactly the same way. This is what it looks like before you prime it. It was a larger wall so it has slices between some of the pieces and my dad made them alternate so all of the cuts didn’t end up in the same place. The smaller walls we just did all the same length. After they finished getting the wall installed I sanded down a few places that had some splinters/rough edges. That is when I primed it with primer. I did 2 coats of primer and let it dry overnight. This was the wall after two coats of primer. The next day we filled the holes with some wood filler. We let it dry for 2 hours and then sanded it with fine grit sandpaper. I wiped down any excess dust with a dry towel before painting. Then it was time to paint. I used a Behr paint and primer from Home Depot in the color Cotton White. This was the color of the trim in the room so I knew I liked the color and thought it would make it easy to be able to paint and touch up any trim after we were finished. And that is all we have done so far. We will do touch up painting tomorrow and my dad will be installing the trim when he gets back from work.

I asked my dad what the level of difficulty was for this project and he said probably about a 7 for these rooms. They had some difficult cuts because of the slanted ceilings and then the fact that the one side was not completely level. It probably would not be as bad on a regular wall. If I am being totally honest, Dallas and I could not have done this on our own I don’t think. Neither of us have a lot of experience with making the cuts needed for the slanted walls. If you are planning on doing this I would definitely recruit someone to help that has experience with woodworking. I would also suggest grabbing an extra piece of material just in case. Thankfully my dad didn’t mess up any cuts because we used every.single.last.piece of material. If Dallas and I did this I can guarantee we would have messed some up and ran out of material before we were finished.

It took my dad and husband about 2 hours to do the small bathrooms. The large bedroom wall took around 6 hours to complete and my dad did it on his own. These times do not include prep, cleanup, or painting.

Overall, this project hasn’t been too bad and was relatively cheap! The boards were around $14 a piece and we got 4, trim piece was $12, nails were $10, primer $16, $27 for the Behr paint coming out to around $130 with tax. I don’t think that was bad at all for both bathrooms and the large bedroom wall, plus the white paint is our trim paint so I can use it for touch ups!

I will continue to update and add to this after we finish, but so many people wanted to know what materials we used so I wanted to get it to you ASAP. Hope y’all enjoy this and if you decide to try it out let me know or tag me in your post. I can’t wait to get ours finished and share the final product. ❤️