Planning and Installing Shiplap as a Bedroom Accent Wall

If you missed yesterday’s post on headboard inspiration and planning, know that I’ve leaned away from having a formal headboard in our master bedroom, instead pushing towards overhauling the whole wall to add texture and interest.

With a goal of anchoring the bed that currently sits off-center beneath the small window, a horizontal line treatment felt like it would be achievable, and more favorable than vertical boards, like run-of-the-mill wainscoting. Laser beam demonstration, anyone?

I also thought it’d help to make the room feel wider (it already felt taller by dropping the boxspring and mattress down to floor level). It’s the kind of thing you see done often with paint stripes, and as much as I love painted stripes (you’ve seen my living room, right?), I wanted something a little more dimensional.

Yesterday, I prodded you to consider how easy it is to find reclaimed clapboard siding. Siding? In a bedroom? Radical.

This was going to be a piece of cake. Right?

1) Go buy 100 sq. ft of reclaimed siding at 15-50 cents a linear foot.
2) Be happy that I only spent $15-50 and go through the Starbucks drive-through on the way home. Hope that the boards extending out of the Jeep don’t clip another car when I go around the tight curve.
3) Sand and install boards on the wall of the bedroom easily, in an afternoon or maybe two, while catching up on DVR’ed Holmes Inspection episodes.

It didn’t go quite that easily. Maybe you’re not surprised, but I am. And here’s why:

My favorite salvage shop reported that they had two clapboards earlier in the week (only two!) but rarely have them in stock, and never in any sizable quantity. Go figure that clapboards, ancient or not, are difficult to remove intact and are essentially worthless to resellers. Most everyone told me to just go and buy new cedar, even if it was a lower grade variety for a few dollars per sq. ft. Few dollars, ha.

Zoink. For a sweet $300-400 I could have a full-wall headboard made of brand-spankin’ new cedar clapboard… or… I could devise a new plan.

Ding, ding, ding. That new plan involved shiplap paneling.

Say what? Shiplap is that lumber in the back corner of your favorite big box store with rabbeted edges, usually right next to the wainscoting and assorted paneling options. It’s more frequently used as an exterior material for sheds and barns in colder climates (since the rabbet allows for a good, weatherproof seal), but I was inspired to use it inside after having seen it used successfully in a bathroom treatment. This photo’s a total sneak peek of a fantastic beach house in town; here’s a link to a fantastic tour.

But yessir, I brought home 22 1″x8″x8″ boards (which may or may not be enough for my job). At $7.97 each with a handsome 10% discount, plan B set me back just under $160.00. More expensive than reclaimed could have been, less expensive than cedar clapboard.

The mother of all framing nail guns sneaked into my trunk too. That’s Pete’s new pride and joy, so you’ll probably be reading about it on Dadand.com one of these days. All I can say is that it’s beautiful, lightweight, and a lovely shade of sea foam green. But anyways…

When installed horizontally, the seam in the shiplap allows for a  shadowing effect and therefore, an awesome-yet-subtle texture to accent the wall and serve as a soon-to-be-neat headboard treatment.

I learned a lot while installing the shiplap, so keep reading to learn how it’s done. I also had a lot of trials during my first attempt at staining shiplap (read about that here). Best advice I can give you? Stain it BEFORE you install (the nail holes will be hardly visible).

And jump ahead to see the finished bedroom here.

If this post is helpful, please grab the below image for Pinterest!

Have you worked with this lumber for interior application before? If yes, I’d love to see some examples of your work!