Shiplap is all the rage, right?! It really is a great way to add instant character and charm to any space. We have several rooms in our home that we are planning to add shiplap, both horizontal and vertical designs. Due to time constraints and our wish to DIY some projects, we decided to drywall our entire home during the build process and later add shiplap as we carve out time. I have read that having the drywall behind the shiplap actually improves your home’s energy efficiency, I can’t confirm that, but it’s on the inter-webs, LOL. Of course, if you don’t have drywall then you would probably just want to stick with the store-bought tongue and groove shiplap.

So for our powder bath, the inspiration is dark navy with brass/gold features and nautical themes. I love the idea of dark colored shiplap so I’m excited that this is the first room we decided to tackle.

There’s lots of DIY blogs and youtube videos that can give advice on creating faux shiplap, but we just took Purebond birch plywood bought from the Home Depot and ripped it into eight inch pieces. There’s all kinds of looks you can create with shiplap, but for this room I wanted modern and sleek. Using larger size (eight inch) planks give a more modern look especially when wood filler is used to even out all of the imperfections and nail holes. It really looks sharp! To add to that, we did a double nickel gap (just used two nickels stacked) to create a more defined gap and add a more modern twist on the traditional shiplap look (which is six inch + single nickel gap tongue and groove).

Next, we hung all of the shiplap in the bathroom. This was a tedious task because Matt is such a perfectionist and wanted every single board and angle just right. After that step we did the caulking to fill in corner gaps and wood filler to create perfectly smooth boards all the way around the room.

Lastly, we sanded and painted the shiplap. Using Benjamin Moore Hale Navy, we started with paint brushes and rollers. We quickly realized that getting the paint into the gaps proved very tough. Eventually we ended up at Home Depot late on Saturday night purchasing a paint sprayer with high hopes. The sprayer just wasn’t spraying evenly enough or finely enough to coat those gaps for us. On a last ditch effort we tried a small tip artist paint brush, and ……. TA DA! It worked! It wasn’t super efficient, but it got the job done.

Scroll to the bottom for a look at the before and after. Also, if you go to @summer_onthecoast on instagram and view my highlights labeled “Navy Powder Bath” you can watch this whole project take shape in the videos.

The total cost fo the materials (not including the tools) was just under $200. That includes wood, paint, and caulk.

BTW, This was NOT a weekend project (especially if you’re a newbie or a perfectionist ;-) This took much longer than I had originally anticipated.

And if you want to get real technical, here is a list of lessons learned from Matt:

Ripping the plywood - using a portable Rigid brand table saw bought from Home Depot to rip the plywood into 8 in strips, we continually had slippage from the table saw fence. This caused us to have slight variance with a lot of the strips. We had to go back and re-cut several of the strips, and it just added unnecessary time to the project. I ended up just using clamps to brace the fence in place, but it was pretty frustrating. I am not ready to dump the table saw just yet, but I am going to tighten down every screw on the fence and evaluate performance again on the next project.

Ensuring level boards on a 4 walled room - most of the projects on youtube that I watched didn’t address ensuring all sides of of the wood strips are level. We started from the top and worked down, but it is not advisable just to measure from the ceiling, to get a starting level line, due to the ceiling drywall often not being level. To ensure that the boards were level, we used a laser level set up on a tripod. The laser/tripod combo comes in handy for just about every project I do.

One whole wall at a time versus one single complete row at a time - most of the videos online show only one wall being put in at a time. In order to maintain level rows on each wall, I decided to do one row at a time on each wall. This ensured that the wood stayed level across the four walls. I used the laser level to check all four walls at once, basically after I completed every other row.

Make fixes immediately - for the most part, all of the boards lined up end to end. On one of the boards, however, I slightly dropped the board as I was nailing it in. Since I didn’t realize the mistake until I had nailed the whole board completely, I figured I would just “work it out” as I continue putting the next rows in. Unfortunately I didn’t easily get that slight error worked out, and it plagued an entire wall. I might be the only one who notices the error, but in hindsight I would have just been quick to remove a board if it wasn’t perfectly level. Even with glue, brad nails are removed very easily.

Painting between the cracks in the wood - For this project, Summer actually painted the whole bathroom blue before we started because a lot of people recommend doing it. There were also a lot of recommendations to paint the edges of the boards. After doing this project, I would recommend neither. My recommendation is to just get one of the sharp tipped brushes from the Home Depot, and paint between the boards as part of the initial trim work. In order to get the either the top or bottom edge of the boards blue, I felt that I also adequately painted the drywall in between anyway, so no need to paint the drywall beforehand. I also tried to use a paint spray gun to get in between, and that turned out to be a disaster. All it did was pool paint on the edges of the boards (that I had to take a brush and smooth over), and get blue paint on the white ceiling. So maybe there is an expert in painting that will say otherwise, but for faux shiplap, I will just be using a sharp edge brush from now on and not painting beforehand.

Look where the edges will be visible - I found that I had to intentionally paint either the top or the bottom edge while painting in the gap. So for eye level gaps, I had to paint both the top and bottom edge. But from about 7 feet and up, I only had to paint the top board of the gap because the edge of the bottom board isn’t visible as you look up.

Sorry this post is sooooo late… but we sure hope it is helpful to you! Again, don’t forget to visit @summer_onthecoast on instagram and this whole project with photos and videos is saved under my highlight labeled “Navy Powder Bath.”

Thanks SO MUCH for being here,