Makeover Week: Planking The Walls & Ceiling

The first thing we did as part of my mom’s office makeover, was start planking the walls and ceiling. My mom picked out this part of the room makeover, and I have to say, she chose right!

Before she left for vacation, we discussed the different options for the room, but she really liked the idea of planking a few of the walls. She also wanted to install beadboard or planking on the ceiling, mainly because, for whatever reason, the ceiling in my old bedroom really rippled across the whole room. I’ll show you what I mean a little bit further down the post. 

To get started on the walls, we removed all of the existing trim. My mom had previous (a few years ago) had all of her windows replaced throughout the house, and she made all of the bedroom windows larger, which drastically helped make this room look larger. The entire room needed new trim, which we would work on after all of the planking was finished. 

With all of the trim removed, we started planking the two walls she had designated. We followed our same tutorial, and cut the boards to 6″ wide pieces. We started at the top, and worked our way down the wall. 

Anthony and I have this down….

We finished the first wall, and then started on the second wall with the window…

We worked our way down the wall, cutting the planks around the window, outlet, and heat register. This wall was more time consuming, and the window wasn’t perfectly straight in the wall, so Anthony had to “fake it” straight with the planks. He was worried you’d be able to see the slight slant of the window against the straight lines of the planks, but he doesn’t give himself nearly enough credit. 🙂

At this point, I had to leave the house and run some errands. When I got back, he had the wall finished, the window framed and had started working on the ceiling.

The main reason my mom wanted to installed the beadboard originally, was becuase the ceiling had these ripples everywhere the drywall was screwed into the ceiling. Rather than installing beadboard sheets, Anthony recommend he install pine tongue and groove in the oposite direction of the ripples. 

His thought, and he was right, was that beadboard wasn’t a heavy enough material to cover the ripples in the ceiling. Instead, it would follow the existing ceiling with the flow of the ripples. The only other options was to actually “frame” out the ceiling. He would have to shim each section of ripples to insure the ceiling was straight. That process would have been very time consuming, so he came up with another option, which worked the best. 

We installed pine tongue and groove (like these) on the ceiling. They were thick enough to keep their true straight shape, and the “beadboard look” my mom was wanting. He installed them the width of the room, which meant they would cover the ripples perfectly, without mimicking them.

This picture shows the ripples in the ceiling. Anywhere there’s a gap, there’s a ripple. 

So, pine tongue and groove to the rescue!

At this point, the room started to feel like a tomb, really dark and closed in. I knew paint would completely transform it. Not to worry mom!

The ceiling did take Anthony a bit of time, and he’s asked that he has a large break from doing this to another ceiling. But I might have mentioned that I’d like to do this to several rooms in our house at the same moment he was just about “over it”. Haha. 🙂

But, once it was done, it was totally worth it! We just had about 50,000 nail holes to cover with putty! No biggie…………

To cover all of the seams of the walls and ceiling, we installed quarter round…

Anthony wanted to wait to install the quarter round to the walls until the new carpet and trim were installed, so at this point he only did the ceiling. 

I covered all of the nail holes, and left my mom to paint the walls and ceiling. That was the last thing in the room she completed, and was fully anticipating coming home to a mess of a house. I had other plans! (Bahahaha!- In my evil laugh!) 🙂

Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing about a few other secrete projects we were working on while they were gone!