DIY SHIPLAP WALLS: FOR BEGINNERS: EASY & AFFORDABLE

Today is a very big day because we are finally going to show you how to put shiplap up in your house. If you follow me on Instagram then you saw about a month ago we put up a shiplap wall in our playroom. So once we completed that wall and we saw how easy it was we decided that we were going to shiplap our entire living room. Okay I'm going to put a disclaimer out there that we are not professionals in any way. If you are looking for that this is not the video for you. We researched shiplap DIY for months on blogs, YouTube videos, and we found a way that works for us. This is very simple, affordable, and really easy to do with not a lot of tools. So if you think that is you, keep on watching. So the first step in shiplap is you need to paint your walls white. I researched this a lot and people said different things. The easiest way I can explain it is if you are going to put shiplap up and you want it to look like real shiplap with gaps in between your wood, you need to paint it white. That's going to be really hard to get a brush in between those gaps. So just do it really quick right before. Go to Walmart and buy the cheapest white paint that you can and put on one layer. All right after you have painted the walls, the next thing that you need to do are mark the studs in the wall. So those are the two by fours that are beneath the drywall and you need to mark them so that your shiplap has something to hold on to. If you only put the shiplap into the drywall then it's not going to be secured. Okay so we bought this tool at Lowe's. It was twenty dollars and it will beep and tell you where the two by fours are in the wall and you can mark them on the wall. So he's already marked the two by fours and they go all the way down. So if you marked it up here it'll go all the way down to the floor. All right once you've marked the studs on the wall you can put the shiplap up. So we bought our shiplap from Home Depot. It was cheaper than Lowe's and all it is is plywood. So we bought the one fourth inch thick plywood already sanded. You can buy the plywood that's not sanded. It's cheaper but you're gonna have to do a lot of sanding at home. So if you buy the shiplap already sanded here you can ask them at Home Depot to cut your boards for you. So shiplap. Sorry. So plywood comes in eight foot boards or four foot boards right? Try. Yeah and depending on your room you can get either. If the walls are eight foot or less you could go for the four foot boards. If it's bigger than eight foot then get the eight foot boards. So we asked them to cut the boards into six inch strips and they will do it for free and then we took it home and we took a piece of sanding paper and sanded all of the edges. So when we did this last time the guy who cut it didn't do as good of a job and Trey had to sand every single edge. This time the guy who did it did a good job so he didn't have to sand as much but these are six inch strips for the shiplap. You can do eight inches whatever you prefer for your room. We did six inch in the other room so we're just going to do the same throughout the whole entire house. Okay so the next step is to figure out a pattern for your shiplap. Now last time we did it we just kind of did it as we went but you need a pattern because you're going to have creases or cracks in your boards where they meet like this and if you did the same pattern you would have the same crack all the way down and it's not going to look as authentic. This room I think it was like 11 foot or so so we came up with a pattern. We had a crease here a crease here and then we did two and then a crease and then we did two and then a crease and then we did two boards and then so on and so on all the way down. The next step before putting up the plywood is taking off your baseboards. So we're not taking off the baseboards in this room because they are pretty thick and the plywood is going to match up with it nicely and we have crown molding. We're going to keep it up there but if you have a room that has old baseboards or little baseboards you might want to take them off. They're just nailed into the wall so if you take a pry bar is that what it's called? Crowbar. If you take a crowbar you can pry the baseboard away from the drywall and take it off and just do your shiplap all the way down to the floor but you're going to have to cut the carpet if you're doing that. Okay so in this room we cut the carpet and peeled away the baseboard and the plywood went all the way to almost the floor so that whenever we do get new floor in here the floor will match up and then this will be sealed with the quarter round. So you do need to be careful when pulling up the baseboard because you don't want to rip it. If you see right there it kind of broke this piece. You got to be very careful if you're just doing one wall. If you're doing the whole entire room you can just take all of the baseboards up and it's not a problem. Okay so we're about to put up the shiplap but you need to level. You need to make sure that it's level. This was only ten dollars. Is it level? Yeah. It's about level. So it's not level over here that's probably why we have a big crack right there. This one is not level so what do we need to do? So we're going to start on the other side. So we're going to start on the other side. And we will just keep going and keep it level from that side so we don't have to start here. Okay. Okay. Okay so we just got done with the first row and all we used were hammers and finishing nails. So these are one and a half inch finishing nails and we nailed them in what like every six inches? Every stud. To hit every stud and at the top and at the bottom and we haven't done this side yet because Trey's going to do that last but basically you need to take the length of the room and measure the length of your plywood and try to determine the size of your pieces based on the length of your room. So this is a full eight foot board. Trey cut this one so that it would line up perfectly here because we have a little spot and so once that's covered he can just alternate and flip flop these two boards all the way down. Trey wanted me to add that you might need marriage counseling after this because it's kind of stressful at first because you have to figure out the size of the boards. Yeah we don't know what we're doing so um this took us like 30 minutes but it was a lot of measuring and math work and it takes a bit but after you figure out the length of the boards you can cut them ahead of time and just start nailing and it goes a lot faster. Okay so we have now come to a point in the wall when you have to cut out of your wood so we did this the hard way before when we didn't have the tools so we're going to show you that way and we bought a jigsaw so that will make it easier. Okay so before you put this piece on you need to make sure that your outlet covers are on and measure your board according to your outlet cover so if you don't like your outlet covers you need to go to the store and get the ones that you want because once you put the board around it they're going to be pretty snug and it's going to be hard not impossible but it's going to be a little hard to get them off. Okay so when you get to your outlets or your light switches you're going to have to do some measuring and really just some marking so what I do don't know if it's the easiest way I take the depth at which I'll need to cut the board so measuring the bottom of the switch I'd mark here and then I took a square and just marked it all the way through and then to get the width I just brought it down here got these two marks here and then again I got a square and then just drew it through so now when I go to cut I know I can just cut this little notch out. Okay Trey's gonna be cutting right here yeah with a jigsaw now last time we did it we used a box cutter a box cutter and a handsaw and a handsaw because we didn't have the correct tool and Trey literally would cut and saw it out and it worked perfectly but we bought a jigsaw for this so he also bought this handy dandy triangle thing to help him draw straight lines and to make sure that his lines are leveled so this might come in handy or you can just use a it's the triangle that's called a square okay well you can really just use a pencil and guess like we did last time oh my goodness okay it's day two and we decided to take off the baseboard so if you are doing this and taking off your baseboards if you get a pry bar like this pry the baseboard away and it should hop it's been almost a week of putting up shiplap we have been working and busy and things so it's taken a while but I'm going to show you the next step the next step is to put quarter round in the corners this is optional you don't have to if you're not doing it then you need to make sure when you're putting up the shiplap that there's not a gap but we like to put it in the corner so this isn't quarter round that sticks out this is quarter round that has like a dip in it and we did that because we have trim at the top and we don't want the quarter round sticking out further than the trim so you can buy this at home depot this was 77 cents a foot and just measure the height of your room multiply it times four trey already measured it and cut it to the right length with the saw so now he's just gonna put it in the corner and nail it if you have a nail gun this would be the perfect time to use it all right so in our other room this is what our quarter round looked like we bought the quarter round here that kind of has like a shiny like plasticky white coat on it and he nailed it in we still haven't painted the nails but this is quarter round that sticks out so that's the difference this is white and our paint here is not white and i didn't really like that so that is why in the other room we're going with a pine quarter round so that i can just paint it all the same color as the wall okay so now that the shiplap is pretty much all put on the wall except for one corner i'm gonna start painting the shiplap and this is the best part because it starts to really look like shiplap so all you need to paint is some sort of tray to put your paint in a roller brush and this roller brush is six inches the perfect length because my boards are six inches and this is actually a microfiber cloth you can buy regular but i thought that this one did a really nice job last time i'm putting the paint on the boards so you can tell the microfiber one is very soft and fluffy now the reason why i like this is because if i'm rolling across the boards this way my roller is not going to get stuck in between the crack in between the boards if you're going up and down or if you have a really big roller your roller is going to get pinched in those cracks and paint is going to squeeze in between the cracks now i guess that wouldn't look that bad if you were doing it like this everywhere but you're going to have to go get a small brush and brush in between the boards to make sure that gunks of paint don't get left everywhere so if you buy the six inch one this will also work if you have eight inch boards it's going to do a lot better than a big one so all i'm going to do is take my primer and i'm going to prime the board wood is very absorbent and it is going to take you layers and layers and layers of paint if you don't prime it first so we went to lowe's and asked somebody what primer to use they were totally trying to get us to buy the most expensive primer in there and you don't need it so we bought kilts to latex primer what was this tray like 16 bucks it was cheap it was less than 20 for sure for a whole gallon you put one layer all over your boards just a thin layer let it dry and then you can apply paint the next step after you've put on the shiplap is to take caulking and fix any nails that may have gotten a little messed up so some people when they do shiplap they take caulking and they put it in to every single crack it's all about preference so you can fill every crack with caulking it's going to take you a lot of time i like the way it looks rustic also i don't like to cover the nails with caulking i like the way that looks too it looks more rustic and if you used little finishing nails you can hardly even see them especially when there's paint over them but if you have a nail that got messed up you can take caulking and cover it all right so this nail kind of got put in a little crooked but it's okay you can just take your caulking this one is solid take your caulking i like to use my fingers trey probably doesn't like that okay um and push it down flat and then let it dry okay so sometimes the brush is a little hard to get on the edges with so i'll just take a cheapy dollar general brush and just paint by the trim but make sure to get that extra paint out of the middle so you zoom in you can see that there's paint in the cracks if you take a body pin and bend it take the skinny edge with no ridges and you can scoot it in there and it gets rid of it i am done it took me almost four hours off and on to paint all of the primer in the room and it is looking amazing still the room is not finished over here but it's looking so good so as you can tell the primer starts to fade it's not as white when it dries as when you apply it so i actually started using a paint brush to finish it because my hands were hurting from holding the roller so actually using a brush was a lot faster i just used the same brush that i showed you earlier so the final step is now you can choose any color paint that you want i went with alabaster by sherman williams i bought it at lowe's you can buy at the sherman williams store too but i got it in a gallon this is their valspar 2000 and i think it was like their basic kind but i got it in a a satin finish so it is very easy to clean so wood itself is very rough and it's not going to be the easiest to wipe down if you get a stain baking you don't want to go with a paint that is matte and not easy to clean the worst thing you can do is put all of this up and then you have to repaint every couple of months because of stains so i got a satin finish you could also get semi-gloss if you'd like with alabaster white if you look it up on pinterest you will see that this is probably the nation's favorite white color i didn't even get a paint swatch and try it at home i just trusted that people were right and it is so alabaster white is a very good color if you're looking for white my wall color is not the same color as my baseboards you might want to tape right now if you're not a good painter we have literally painted every room in this house so i feel like i know what i'm doing now i'm not going to tape also i'm just going to give our trim a good coat of pure white after this because um we haven't painted this trim in this room since we moved in so it needs it so okay so coat one of the paint is done took about three hours now we're filling in any big hole from the wood with spackling some of the wood has holes in it okay so once the spackling dries we will do coat two and hopefully we will be done okay guys we are finally finished with the shiplap it took probably a week and a half to do my hands currently hurting from painting we still might do another coat on the shiplap i don't know i need to think about it for about a week but um it looks beautiful i can't believe that it's finished my husband did an amazing job so it definitely made the room look so much bigger the next plan is to get like barn door window coverings there so i really hope that y'all enjoyed this video if you are sitting at home wishing that you had a shiplap wall or a shiplap room i hope that this video gives you some hope and faith in yourself that you can do it too because believe me i really didn't think we'd ever be able to do something like this and it just took educating ourselves figuring out what to do and if you're a handy person already or a diy person already it makes it that much easier but if you're not just educate yourself and i hope that this video really helps you because believe me we are not professionals at all so if you like this video please give it a thumbs up make sure to subscribe because this is not the last video like this we have many plans to do diy projects to our house thanks so much for watching and i will see you again next time