Hey Y’all!
I am so excited to finally share this post with y’all! It’s a little different from our usual fashion/beauty posts, but I promise it will totally be worth it. So as y’all know, Jared and I recently bought a house and as much as we are in love with our new house, I am very ocd and love to make things my own. That being said, we (just me) instantly started brain storming all of the things I wanted to do to the house. Finally after a lot of planning we decided to start with the dining room as soon as we freed up a little time and money! I was so excited to start with this room because as soon as I saw it I instantly knew what I wanted to do in here. First and foremost I want to introduce y’all to my favorite paint color on the planet. Sherwin Williams “Sea Salt”. It is the most perfect cool blue/green/grey shade that I want to paint my entire house with but am (so far) doing a very good job of refraining and keeping only like one or two (or three) of the rooms this color. I also knew that I wanted to incorporate a little shiplap (because I live by the phrase “what would Joanna do?”) in this room but didn’t know exactly how right away. At first I contemplated doing the big, empty wall with shiplap and painting the other walls SW Sea Salt, but decided this might not look as good with the chair rails around the room. Thats when I decided my best bet was to shiplap underneath the chair rails and paint the upper parts of the walls. I am so glad this is what I decided on because it looks AMAZING!! Seriously I couldn’t be more obsessed with how this room turned out. I also would like to say I am so thankful for Jared and his dad for making this room everything I wanted. Jared’s dad is so handy and I am so glad that Jared inherited this trait as well! I definitely couldn’t have done this without them.
I knew instantly that I was going to share with y’all all of our fun little DIY projects and room renovations, so I am super excited to have a room (almost) completed and ready to share with y’all! Now I just want to go ahead and say that I said almost because there are a few little things and one more big thing left to do with this room. First of all, I need to get a new chandelier (I have my eye on one, just waiting until I can splurge a little and get it) and new curtains. As well as I’m currently piecing together a center piece but don’t have everything for it yet so I’m holding off on adding that in the pictures right now. Lastly Jared and his dad are going to build us a new dining room table. I roughly have in mind what I want but I am so picky that I can’t make up my mind on how I want the legs to look so they haven’t started on that just yet (but don’t worry, when they do I will try and document this so I can keep y’all updated)!
DIY SHIPLAP
Materials
Plywood
White Paint
Paint Rollers
Tile Spacers or Nickels (we used nickels)
Miter Saw
Nail Gun or Staple Gun (we used a staple gun)
Steps
Step 1: Materials! After spending quite some time deciding how exactly we were gonna go about this we chose to use plywood for our shiplap boards. We purchased four sheets but only ended up using three for this small space. (We also purchased
Step 2: Jared and his dad cut all of the plywood into six inch strips. I saw where some people were doing theirs in 8 inch strips but the space we were putting it in was so small I didn’t want my boards to be too wide.
Step 3: We then painted the edges of all of the boards. Don’t forget to do this step. I almost did and would have been very mad if I had to paint them with a tiny paint brush after they were already up on the wall.
Step 4: Find your studs and mark them on your wall/walls. This is also an important step that is easily forgettable. This allowed us to know where we could cut the boards/staple them to the walls.
Step 5: Installation! This was my favorite part because my vision was finally coming to life! We stapled the board to the wall using a staple gun and starting with the bottom board (I don’t really think this matters, just thought I’d include it). After each board was stapled down we would us a nickel to as a spacer between boards to create a gap. This is important because otherwise you loose the panelling look. Jared kept joking that we could just draw on the lines with a sharpie to give it this effect. I didn’t really find this funny…
Step 6: Once you have all of your boards up and looking fabulous, you get to paint them. Now we were advised by a Lowes employee that we needed to prime the boards first before painting them. So we bought primer and did this. After taking the time to prime them I can honestly say this suggestion/advice was pointless. Although we bought a nice/expensive that the guy suggested to us, it went on horribly and seriously made no difference (if I were you I would skip that step). So although this was technically a step were gonna act like it never happened and move on to painting. We bought a gallon of extra white paint from Lowes (doesn’t really matter the brand, we just made sure it matched out base boards, I think we went with Olympic brand, I could be wrong). We used a roller which at times seemed a little difficult, especially in the corners, but I think in the end it turned out just fine! After only two coats, we were finally done painting!
Step 7: If you are only doing a single single wall you probably won’t have to do this last and final step but since we had a few walls that led to door ways and entry ways we couldn’t just leave the edges raw like that. Jared’s dad ended up making us these little borders out of wood that we painted the same colors as the boards. We actually just ended up getting these installed last weekend even though this room has pretty much been done for about three weeks now.
So that’s that y’all! My new and improved dining room! I am so obsessed with it its not even funny. I constantly find myself sitting at the table just staring at the walls. I am so glad we got to take on this project first because one of the biggest things I was looking for in a house was a dining room/eating area separate from the kitchen (which is oddly a lot harder to find in a house that I thought). Everyone laughed when I said this was high on my list of priorities, but I love cooking and love having people over so I think this room will be put to use more than expected. We recently started on our powder room downstairs (it had some God awful dragonfly wallpaper that I can’t wait to show y’all), so hopefully we will finish that soon and get that up for y’all to see! Until then, enjoy our newly renovated dining room! (PS. I did not edit these photos in hopes that it would show off how pretty the color of this room is, so if some of them are a little ehh… I’m so sorry!!)
Until Next Time,
overdressedandunderrated.com 