Good morning y’all!!!!!!! So I kind of ordered my blog posts a little backwards, but that’s okay. I got excited about my farmhouse crown molding that I forgot about posting my planked ceiling tutorial. Sooooo without further ado, here it is. Guys, this was such a game changer for this room. It made such an impact, was super easy, and was super budget friendly.
Remember, our bedroom update was done in the 1970’s so that means we also had stippled ceilings. Stippled ceilings are done with a ton of joint compound and a tool that makes the ceilings look all sorts of crazy. In our last house we had popcorn ceilings which were fairly easy to remove. However with this kind of ceiling, it isn’t as easy and turns out our bedroom ceilings were painted. Once a textured wall or ceiling is painted, it almost makes it impossible to remove with a pump prayer and scraper. This is exactly what I did upstairs and it worked well, but it did not work in our Master bedroom at all because of the paint.
So with that said, we had to figure out what to do. We could remove the ceiling, or we could cover it. With sheet rock work, my husband felt most comfortable having someone do the finishing work. He could put the sheet rock up, but would have loved for someone to finish it. Well turns out trying to find contractors around here was very difficult so we turned to option 2, to cover it up. And that is exactly what we did.
Here is what you will need for this project…
*Wood planking
*Nail gun
*Liquid nails
*Miter saw(or hand saw if that’s all you have)
*Wood filler
*Sanding block
We tried to think about all the options of what to use and ultimately we wanted to find something VERY lightweight and something affordable and easy to work with. Insert these beauties…
Each pack came with 14 square feet and we needed about 13 packs. Our Lowes had 12 so we scooped them up. One big word of advice…. MAKE SURE YOU CAN GET ALL THE MATERIALS YOU NEED BEFORE STARTING A PROJECT LIKE THIS. These apparently were not coming back in our store and we could not order them, so we were left to finding a store that had them. Thankfully a store near my husband’s job had some in stock and he was able to go get that extra set after work one day. Of course we had already put all of the planks on the ceiling before getting that last pack. We thought maybe somehow we would have had enough. That was clearly not the case.
So at this point all we did, was take each piece and put a little bit of liquid nails on the back and put it directly on the ceiling. You will definitely need two people to do this job. One needs to hold up one end of the piece while the other holds the other end and nails into the ceiling. We put nails in on each side of the groove every 3 inches or so. These boards were not going anywhere.
Then you just want to measure the difference and cut the boards. As you can see we kind of staggered the boards. We didn’t want any seams to be next to each other. And whatever we cut off the one board, we would use that for the next row. This was definitely a perfectly imperfect job. We knew that going into it, but we still love it so much.
One thing I would do differently next time around(we will probably be doing our master bathroom ceiling soon) is paint the boards before putting them up. Only because I really hate painting ceilings, and it is not super easy to get into the grooves with a paint roller to the ceiling. You could easily spray these with a paint gun, use a brush even though it would take a while, or lay them out and roll them while on the ground.
These boards did have a lot of knots and holes in them. We chose to fill the big holes in with wood putty. We let that dry overnight then painted. This is where I made a big mistake that I shared on my last blog post. When filling in the holes you want to make sure that the surrounding area does not have a ton of excess wood filler. I spent so much time sanding. It was a complete mess and a mistake I will not do again. I have thoroughly learned my lesson because that was awful.
Overall this was a very easy DIY project that did not take a lot of time. All of the cuts were easy and the application of the boards went very smoothly. We definitely had a rhythm on this one and it went very quickly until I messed up the wood filler. But live and learn, I just have to tell myself.
As always, I would love to hear if you try this project or even something similar. I would love to see it!
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