I spent three weekends staring at the walls in my dining room before I finally admitted they needed help.
Shiplap has this reputation—part farmhouse chic, part HGTV fever dream—but here’s the thing: it’s essentially planks of wood installed horizontally with deliberate gaps between them, and those gaps create shadow lines that trick your eye into seeing depth and texture where there wasn’t any before. The term originally referred to boards used on ship exteriors, overlapping to keep water out, but modern interior shiplap doesn’t overlap at all; we use spacers, usually nickels or proprietary plastic clips, to maintain consistent spacing of roughly 1/8 inch between boards. I used to think you needed actual tongue-and-groove boards for this, turns out you can use plain pine or even plywood ripped into strips, and honestly, the plywood version holds up better in humid climates because it doesn’t expand and contract as dramatically with seasonal changes. The whole aesthetic depends on those shadow lines—without them, you’re just installing expensive paneling that looks flat and somewhat sad under most lighting conditions.
Measuring Your Space and Cutting Boards With Actual Precision Because Eyeballing Never Works
Start by measuring your wall height and width, then—and I cannot stress this enough—subtract space for baseboards and crown molding if you’re keeping them. My first attempt ignored the baseboard situation entirely, and I ended up with a weird 2-inch gap at the bottom that I tried to convince myself was “intentional negative space.” Measure from corner to corner at multiple points because walls are never actually straight; my 1920s house has a variance of nearly 3/4 inch from one side to the other, which means if you cut all your boards to the same length, you’ll recieve increasingly dramatic gaps as you move across the wall. For cutting, a miter saw works best—circular saws leave rougher edges and require more sanding—and you want to cut boards about 1/4 inch shorter than your wall width to allow for expansion. I guess it makes sense that wood moves, but I didn’t truly understand this until I installed boards tight to the corners in July and watched them buckle slightly by October when the heat kicked on and humidity dropped.
Mark your studs with painter’s tape before you start nailing anything. You’ll need to hit studs every 16 or 24 inches depending on your house’s framing, and construction adhesive alone won’t hold these boards long-term, despite what one overconfident YouTube video suggested to me at 2am. Use a stud finder that actually works—the cheap magnetic ones are unreliable—or knock on the wall and listen for the solid thunk versus hollow sound, which feels ridiculous but definately helps.
The Installation Process That Took Me Four Tries To Stop Screwing Up Completely
Here’s where everything either clicks or falls apart, sometimes literally.
Start at the bottom, not the top, because you want your cleanest cuts at eye level where people actually look, and the bottom board hides behind furniture anyway or gets covered by baseboard trim you reinstall later. Level that first board obsessively—if it’s off by even half a degree, the error compounds as you stack boards upward, and by the time you reach the ceiling you’re dealing with a 2-inch discrepancy that makes you question your spatial reasoning abilities and possibly your entire career path. I’ve seen people use a 4-foot level for this, but a laser level projected across the wall works better because you can see immediately if you’re drifting. Secure the board with a brad nailer using 2-inch nails, two nails per stud, angled slightly to increase holding power. Don’t nail through the face if you can avoid it—nailing at the tongue or using the gap as camouflage for nail holes saves you from wood-filling a hundred tiny holes later, which is mind-numbing work that makes you reconsider all your life choices.
Place your spacers on top of the first board—nickels work fine, though they’re tedious to position every 6 inches or so, and those plastic clip spacers from home improvement stores speed things up considerably if you’re doing a large wall. Set your second board, level it independently (don’t assume the first board’s level transfers upward—it doesn’t), then nail it down. Repeat this process approximately 40 times until your arm feels like it’s going to detach from your shoulder and you’ve developed a Pavlovian flinch response to the sound of the compressor refilling.
Wait—maybe this sounds straightforward, but corners are where the physics of old houses betray you. Inside corners rarely form true 90-degree angles, so boards meeting in corners need to be scribed and cut individually rather than assumed to fit. Outside corners benefit from trim pieces that cover the seam, and honestly, I just used corner molding painted the same color as the shiplap because trying to miter those seams perfectly felt like a bridge too far for my skill level. Around outlets and light switches, turn off the power (obviously), remove the cover plates, and use a jigsaw to cut notches in the boards—measure twice, cut once, and add an extra 1/16 inch around the outlet box because drywall screws for the cover plates need threading room.
Anyway, once you’ve covered the wall, caulk the gaps at ceiling and corners with paintable latex caulk, then prime and paint everything in one go so the shadow lines remain visible but cohesive. Two coats minimum, because one coat lets the wood grain show through in a splotchy, unfinished way that screams “I gave up halfway.”
The finished wall either looks intentional and textured or like you installed a bunch of fence slats indoors—the difference comes down to consistent spacing, level boards, and paint quality, which sounds simple until you’re three hours in and seriously reconsidering whether flat drywall was really that boring.
