Continuing with the behind the scenes of our kitchen remodel, this post will go over ripping and installing faux shiplap.
When Christy told me she wanted to cover every inch of wall with shiplap, I died a little inside. It sounded like a lot of work. At least I could get it easily ripped into planks at Lowes.
That turned out to be a big negative. Christy read multiple places online that home improvement stores will rip all the boards for you. Lowes will not cut a board less than 12″. I thought “Stupid Lowes. I’m going to Home Depot”. I always loved Lowes, but they seem to be lacking this last year or two.
I went to Home Depot and got shot down again. They won’t cut anything less than 12″ either. Bunch of followers. Apparently, no one is willing to risk cutting their fingers off anymore. What is our society coming to?
It was going to be more work, but I have a table saw, so we’ll knock it out in short order. Or so I thought. I bought 10 sheets of 1/5″ underlayment from Home Depot because Lowes’ lumber is crookeder than a DC politician and I headed home.
Ripping
Apparently, a $99 Skil table saw is not the right tool to cut a straight line on a 4′ X 8′ board. Our first attempt at ripping the shiplap was a disaster. Christy and I trying to guide that big, awkward sheet through without making it a jaggedy mess wasn’t happening so we had to go to plan B.
We ended up having to take the deck table down to the driveway, clamp a 1″ X 4″ board to it and rip it with a circular saw.
7 1/2″ is burned into my brain. That’s how many inches we had to measure at each end with my wallboard square from the edge of the underlayment with the perpendicular head butted up against the guide board.
The further you get into the board, you’ll want something heavy to weigh down the side still on the table so it doesn’t topple off, like above.
Since the faux shiplap boards were running only a nickle width apart, even a 1/16″ discrepancy may have been noticed, which we found out with an 8′ board that I had to take back off the wall and replace.
I’d measure the 7 1/2″, then Christy would measure, then I would measure. We must have looked ridiculous walking in a figure 8 around each other, passing the square back and forth. If any neighbors saw us they probably thought we were ADD. And if it was a hair off and we needed to adjust the board, it started all over again.
All that fretting paid off though. All the shiplap has nice, clean, level lines.
One tip I have from that experience is make sure you are clear from your table surface. We had a casualty early in where I went a couple inches into our aluminum table. Oops.
It’s not the end of the world though. With a seven person household now, we’ve already outgrown that dining set and will need something new this upcoming summer, now that our baby boy is getting big enough to not be in a highchair outside.
Sanding
After ripping 10 sheets into 60 planks, it was time for the sanding. My poor wife took on the task of cleaning up the splintered edges. It was a long, grueling process.
Another tip that came out of all this wood cutting is that we found the table side of the cut will splinter. So if you are cutting on a table saw, you want the finished side up. If you are cutting with a circular saw, you want your finished side down. That will keep the sloppiness of any splintering on the back side of the board.
Installing
After that was done we had the joy of hanging all of the faux shiplap. We didn’t get any pictures of this because we needed all the hands we could get on the main boards and I’m horrible at documenting projects so I didn’t think to get pictures of the smaller pieces being installed. Plus, Christy had her hands full even when she wasn’t helping me. Did I mention we have 5 kids?
You would think starting from the bottom and using gravity to hold the nickles in place would be the easier way, and I’m sure that would be correct, but we don’t do things the easy way.
After some debating, we decided to start at the ceiling and work our way down. The reason being, the top boards are more visible than the bottom boards, so we wanted full boards to be at the top and not end up with a half board in clear view.
That thinking also came in handy with trimming off the excess height to make the bottom boards fit. Those boards are broken up by the pantry and peninsula so it was easy to rip those down on the table saw instead of ripping full length boards with the circular saw again.
I’m anal so I verified with a level on each board, but once we got the top board level it was pretty much just a matter of getting a few nickles in between the planks, applying pressure up for a tight, even fit, and nailing in the plank.
The right tool for the job
I did get a great toy out of this part of the project. A DeWalt 20 Volt Brad Nailer. Christy thought I was kidding when I left to rent a brad nailer and came back with a $300 tool. This was a remodel on a budget and that was not in the budget.
My reasoning was, it was $30 a day to rent one, so it would pay for itself in 10 days of use. With the amount of time I’ve used it during this project, it probably paid for itself twice over. This was an ever changing “9 week” project that took 4 months.
Plus, renting would have involved multiple trips back and forth to Home Depot to rent and return during different stages of the project. And I still have it for future projects…which will come. Trust me.
The finished product
So here is the finished product. It looked so great, it was a shame to paint it. We thought about keeping it natural, but in the end it would have been too dark and clashed with everything else we had planned. Maybe in a different house.
In my next kitchen post, I’ll go over our new peninsula cabinets and the guides we got for mounting the hardware.