Shiplap and the start of dining room updates

Having been in out house for 6.5 years, I am starting to get the urge to update/change things in several rooms. One of the rooms that I want to change is the dining room. The walls are currently green which I surprisingly don't hate. I really want to replace our square pub-height table with a regular height rectangle table. I think something longer but narrower would fit the space better. I also want to ditch the rug in here. But that leads to other issues because I HATE my white tile floors.

We did a wood wall back when we did Brayden's Nursery and I didn't want to necessarily do the same thing in the dining room since I wanted something lighter. So we decided to do shiplap on the wall behind the buffet. I was nervous about it not being able to hold the weight of the aisle runner from our wedding so I read a bunch of tutorials and basically sat on the project for a few weeks ( it was supposed to by Birthday gift). One Friday afternoon, I was doing some work at home and Tim said " I feel like working on a project" so off to Lowe's we went. Oh and  ultimately, we came up with an easy work-around that I will share in a minute.

We purchased 2 sheets of 4X8, 1/4 inch Birch plywood boards and had them cut down into 6 inch strips by Lowe's. We weren't sure if we would have enough to cover the wall but knew it would at least get us started. Tim sanded the rough edges of the boards down while I started painting the wall. If you read tutorials on shiplap many people don't paint the wall first. I was just afraid of my green paint showing through the spaces. I literally used whatever white paint I had on hand. It didn't have to look perfect  since it was going to be covered anyway.

A few hours later, we began adding our boards. We decided to put them put as is and paint them later. I read both ways various tutorials I read online. We also decided to start from the top and work our way down.

In retrospect was such a good decision! We has such a small space between our moulding and wood that we easily just added a small line of caulk. I feel like it would have been more noticeable at the top.

As far as board lengths go, we followed no pattern. We just cut as we went and used scraps for the next row.  We used a nail gun to secure the boards to the wall. We used nickels to keep our spacing between the rows uniform as we went. ( Side note: We opted not to do this vertically between the boards and only did it horizontally). Once we got a few rows in, we had to address the aisle runner issue. I decided not to remove the anchors/screws before painting. We decided that since the aisle runner is a permanent fixture in our house for sentimental reasons, we would simply drill two holes in our board so that we can use the existing screws and anchors ( picture below). When it came time to re-hang the picture, we simple backed out the screws a little and the picture was perfectly placed once again.

After all the wood was installed, I went back and filled in ALL the nail holes with wood putty. Once dry, I sanded all the spots with my palm sander and also any rough spots that were on the boards. Yes, it made a mess of my house but was worth it. I vacuumed the whole wall with the shopvac before moving on to the next step.

You might notice in the picture above that we also added a trim piece to the raw edge closest to the light switch. This is totally a personal choice but I didn't like the raw edges showing we chose to frame it on this side. Tim really  like this symmetrical so I thought he wouldn't like it because the other side was unframed but we both agreed it looked better.

Next came the painting. I am not a huge fan of paint and primer in one. So I opted to prime then paint. I used some old primer I had on hand. I just did one coat of primer.

Because it was raw wood, it soaked up the paint. I followed the primer by 2 coats of paint. I used simply white by Benjamin Moore (my go-to white) in an eggshell finish. A lot of the tutorials I read said they used the brush to paint the wall so they can paint between the "nickel spaces". I personally wanted those spaces to show as much as possible so I did NOT brush paint in those spaces. After cutting in, I used a door and cabinet roller to paint the wall. This was after one coat.

I preferred the look of the brush versus the roller so the second coat I did with the brush. We waited a few hours for everything to dry. We then re-hung the aisle runner and bushed the buffet back in place. It took us 2-days with lots of kid breaks but the shiplap was FINISHED. It is hard to get a good picture since there isn't a light of natural light in this room.

With the light on

No light

Overall, I am really please with how it came out. It does makes my hate my floors even more ( which I honestly didn't know was possible).  It has made us start working on some other dining room updates which I hope I can share soon :)

What do you think of the green with the shiplap? I got samples of two popular "greige" colors but honestly preferred the contrast with the green. I am open to suggestions!