Making Plywood into Wood Paneling

Our dining room has gone through a couple of different transformations. David always seems to be working on it around the holidays because he gets some time off of work.

Dining Room circa 2013.

I can barely remember it looking like this.

Last year, David painted the dining room a deep red. But after living with it for about a year, he decided he didn't really like it. He wanted to make the room more formal by adding some wood paneling to two of the walls. We agreed to paint it a shade of blue that was a Victorian color. So this year, between Christmas and New Years he was remodeling the dining room again. 

Dining Room circa 2014.

The first day David was supposed to work on it, I came home from work and hardly anything was done. Everything in the dining room was pushed to the side and cluttered with tools so we couldn't really use the room. This made me apprehensive because I didn't think we would have our dining room back for quite some time! Luckily, David picked up the pace it only took two days after that to put up the paneling and most of the crown molding and paint the room. Although there were more finishing touches that needed to be done, we were able to use the room again after that. 

Deciding on the color.

David added panels using plywood. He purchased a 1/4 inch thick piece of plywood that was 4' x 8' for $12. Home Depot cut it in 6 inches pieces but would not cut it any smaller than that. They said it was unsafe to cut it smaller with their saw, so David had to do the dangerous cutting at home. He cut the 6 inch pieces in half with a table saw to create the 3 inch wide paneling. You can purchase the paneling already pre-cut but it's much more expensive and the Handyman Hubby doesn't take short cuts.

Adding the bordering vertical panel.

Paneling goes to edge of door frame and wall..

Creating a box pattern.

He divided the width of the wall by four and the height by three and created a 4 x 3 box pattern on the longer wall. The boxes are not perfect squares, but it looks evenly spaced on the wall. He used a nail gun to secure the panels to the wall. David used a level to keep all of the panels straight, but sometimes when you make things level it looks crooked to the eye because our house isn't level. So David made some tweaks so that the boxes would look straight even though they might be slightly off.

4 x 3 boxes.

One of our walls in our dining room has a section of wall that sticks out in the middle because there are pipes behind it. We put a fake removable fireplace on this wall. David created one box on each side of the section by width and three boxes height.

For now the section of wall that sticks out has no paneling because we knew we wanted to added sconces and weren't sure what pattern we wanted. David may add a design later on. 

Finished Paneling

David used a brush rather than a roller to paint the walls and paneling so that the grain of the wood would be more apparent. He wanted a darker blue and I wanted a lighter blue, so we settled in the middle. The paneling adds more dimension to the dining room and makes it a little fancier. David added crown-molding before painting, but I will discuss that more in another post.

You can see the grain of the wood a bit.

And that's how you use a $12 piece of plywood to transform a room. Below is a time lapse video of some of the work. The paneling wasn't very difficult and changes the look of the room a lot!

Notice Stevie and I standing by while David does the work!