High Impact, Low Budget Bedroom Makeover

Just because you are a designer doesn't mean every square inch of your home is perfectly designed with all the latest and greatest. It's like the hair stylist whose hair is a wreck or the cardiologist who is morbidly obese. It doesn't make sense except that we all suffer from the same ailment...the human condition.

There are two rooms in my house that need my attention. My master bathroom is one. I've done some updating as a stop-gap until we do a total remodel hopefully in the near future. The other is the master bedroom. I have appeased myself by regularly changing out bedding and pillows but have been craving something totally different.

One of my dilemmas has been the paint. Years ago I used a heavily sanded paint on the accent wall, which ended up to be a bad decision. The paint was a nightmare to roll on and after a few years it started to have blotchy patches from the sun, kind of like my skin!

Wallpaper wouldn't adhere to it (especially the grasscloth I was coveting) so I thought I'd just have to try to paint over it and hope it would look decent but that didn't get my heart racing. So I ignored it. That wall was dead to me. It didn't exist. It was actually pretty easy to ignore as our master bedroom is upstairs and probably the least viewed room in the house. I had other rooms I wanted to work on and with a kid in college it's all about prioritizing and tackling that room was low on the list. Until I couldn't live with it. Not even ONE MORE MINUTE.

Ultimately I decided putting shiplap on that wall was what I wanted to do but after doing a little research I realized this would pose a couple of issues:

Real, honest-to-goodness shiplap is a specific kind of board that's often used for constructing sheds, barns, and other rustic buildings. Traditional shiplap has a rabbet (or groove) cut into the top and bottom, which allows the pieces to fit together snugly, forming a tight seal. The planks are .75 inches thick and that would protrude beyond the existing crown molding.
It is a tad pricey! I wanted to stay within a modest budget as we may only be in this house for a couple more years.

Ultimately we decided to do a faux shiplap wood wall. There are tons of DIY tutorials on YouTube and it actually looked relatively simple and my husband was up for the task. This solved both the thickness and budget issue.

We bought pine plywood at Lowe's and had them rip the sheets into 8 inch planks. We nailed them to the wall using a nickel as a spacer. Then we primed (two coats), filled in nail holes and painted (two coats). Some tutorials will tell you to nail AND glue but we didn't want to do that in case I wanted to take them down at some point. Also, the nails held them sufficiently in place and adding glue to the mix wasn't necessary

Here's a lesson learned: prime and paint all your boards BEFORE you nail them to the wall thus avoiding the tedious and time consuming task of painting the edges of each board with a very small artist brush.

As for the rest of the room, we painted all the remaining walls as well as our two nightstands. I did not replace any furniture with the exception of the bench. I also purchased a new rug, light fixtures, mirror, pillow shams and a few new accessories to complete the transformation.

Adding a wood wall is a great way to transform a space and if you DIY it's very budget friendly.

Without further ado, here is the transformation illustrated in photos.

MOOD BOARD