Hey friends! I was just thinking this morning about several things I haven’t shared with y’all. One thing is the faux shiplap we did in our last house.

By the way, did y’all know we moved? I shared about it on Instagram but I don’t think shared it here.

Before we built the lake house we decided we would downsize a bit on our house in Dalton. We really loved our house but after our youngest went to college we decided didn’t need quite that much space anymore. We also loved our neighborhood and didn’t really want to leave there. So, we bought a house about three doors down. 😂 You may be thinking that we are crazy. (Who knows, you may be right 🤷🏻‍♀️🤣)

There are several things I really miss about our house. One of them is this bedroom.

I absolutely loved our shiplap wall behind the bed and I also loved having an all white room. (I loved that part so much we painted the whole entire Lake house white!)

I really enjoyed changing out bed covers and pillows. You can change the entire look of the room without spending a lot of money.

For Christmas I kept the black and white check and added a splash of red, and a really cute pup 😂

In the Spring I was ready for floral so I just changed the quilt.

Ok, so enough about how awesome it is to work with a white room. Let’s get down to business.

Who’s ready to hang some faux shiplap??? 🙋🏻‍♀️ Me! I really want to add shiplap over our fireplace in our new house. But that’s a project for another day. I am documenting this for y’all but also for myself. That way when it’s time to do it again I just have to refer back to this blog post! 😂

We used 4 x 8 sheets of Luan plywood. (Also known as Lauan) This is normally used for flooring underlayment. Sometimes it’s also used on furniture. It is about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. We went to Home Depot and had them cut the 4 x 8 sheets into 8 inch strips.

You will need a sanding block to sand the edges just a little. Because sometimes the wood splinters just a bit.

OK, this is probably the most important thing I will tell you in this entire blog post. So listen up! 😂

Paint the edges of your strips before you hang them on the wall!!!!!

It’s really easy to do. I just stacked up about 8 or 9 at a time and rolled down the edges with the paint roller.

Now, the second most important thing I will tell you. Paint the wall whatever color you’re painting the shiplap before you start hanging the strips.

If you don’t do these things you will spend hours and hours and hours jamming paint into the cracks of Faux shiplap! 🤦🏻‍♀️🤣

So many hours that you feel like your hand just might fall off!

Now that you have the edges of your boards painted and the wall painted you’re ready to start nailing up your boards. If your wall is longer than 8 feet you will want to cut your boards into three different lengths.

You can do the math and decide what links do you need so you don’t have to make as many cuts. The reason you want to do three lengths is so that all of your seams will not line up in a row.

See how the seams are alternating? You’ll notice the seams much less than if they were all in a row.

Now you’re ready to start nailing up your boards.

You can use a nail gun if you have one, if not a hammer and finishing nails will be fine.

We started at the top and went down. I know there may be some controversy about this some people start at the bottom and go up, but I wanted a full piece underneath the crown mold. Sometimes when you start at the bottom you wind up with a tiny little strip at the top.

You’re better off with the small strip landing above the baseboard. Because once your furniture is in the room who’s going to see the bottom anyway? I would much rather have a full piece at the top and then let the bottom land where it may.

As you start nailing up your boards you will need to either use a spacer or a nickel in between each board to give it the gap that real shiplap has.

I don’t have a picture of this part but you literally can take nickels and use them as spacers. A nickel It’s about 1/16 of an inch thick and that’s about how thick the space needs to be in between each board.

One reason we decided to do a Faux shiplap on this wall versus the real deal is because of the thickness of the product. When you have your crown molding and baseboards already Installed on the wall it is so much easier to use faux shiplap instead of real. Real shiplap is much thicker and most of the time you have to take your crown molding and baseboards off of the wall and reinstall them on top of the shiplap once you’re finished.

This process is just a lot easier than having to go through all that. Not to mention it looks awesome and most of the time you cannot tell the difference.

Now you’re ready to caulk the nail holes. We just used regular caulk for this. After the caulk is dry you’ll need to sand just a little to smooth away any dried caulk residue off the boards. This way your paint finish will be smooth.

And that’s it! Now you’re ready to clean up the mess and put back the furniture!

I love the texture the faux shiplap added behind the bed. We never even used a headboard in that room.

So, are you ready to try it? I’m ready to do it again! I’ll keep you posted as to what we shiplap (or faux shiplap) in our new house. 😆

Until next time sweet friends!💗

With much love,

Leanna