All things shiplap

When we began renovating, we knew we wanted to preserve what was behind the yellowed sheet rocked walls... you guessed it! The shiplap!

Something to note about really old, original shiplap is that its super dry and can be very brittle. You have to carefully remove it nail by nail, board by board to keep it from totally cracking apart. All of the ceiling shiplap we left up but most all of the walls, with the exception of two, we had to remove the shiplap as we would be moving the walls and using the shiplap elsewhere.

Original shiplap has a lot more character (at least that's what I call it, others may call it imperfections) than the stuff you can buy new at Lowes or Home Depot. I think both have their pro's and con's but if you have the old stuff, I think you should definitely try to preserve it and use it if the shiplap look is your style! It will also save tons of money! Shiplap isn't cheap.

This is one of the original shiplap walls we were able to leave without taking it a part. We chose to paint all of our solid shiplap walls. While they were beautiful in their natural state, they were a bit dark and rustic for the light and airy farmhouse look we were going for.

We also left all of the ceilings minus the hallway shiplap. We went with sheetrock in the hallway as it houses our air return vent and the staircase to the attic. At the end of the day there isn't a ton of ceiling material that shows and we were running low on original shiplap so we went with sheetrock ceilings their and we've always been happy with that decision.

Let's talk about some of the con's of keeping original shiplap walls and ceilings that you don't hear about often. They are A LOT of work to clean up good enough to paint if you are going that route. Most all original sheetrock was covered with cheesecloth and wallpaper at one point in time or another... We had to first pull out all of the nails that held the sheetrock on, then rip off the wallpaper, then pull off the cheesecloth (A PAIN!!!), then sand, and sand some more, and pull off more cheesecloth strings. It's a process but so worth it in the end!

In our front bedroom, we were having trouble with it feeling drafty so we actually ended up caulking over the entire shiplap wall and ceiling. I was so worried the unique look of the shiplap wouldn't be preserved after we did this but I actually really like the look of it. It's a little cleaner and covers some of the major imperfections like the spray foam coming through some of the holes to keep everything airtight. No one ever said remodeling an old house is glamorous! Ha! If we had the time my preference would be to do this on all of the shiplap ceilings in our house just to clean them up as they have a few rough spots.

One of my favorite features in our home are the shiplap accents above and below the windows in the main living spaces of our house. It was actually the terrible contractor, J's, idea... I hate to even admit that because he was so terrible to us but he did have an eye and talent for woodwork and he did an excellent job on preserving the shiplap and finding ways to incorporate it into our home.

I do like to have some natural wood accents and this was the perfect way to do it without it feeling too heavy or rustic for the home.

Overall, we really love our original shiplap features and feel like they really had to the old house charm of our house.

We do have one small wall of new shiplap and it's actually faux shiplap. The wall was incomplete after we moved in and while I was home on maternity leave with Keller I decided I was sick of looking at it, found this tutorial on Pinterest, loaded up my one-month-old baby and went to the lumber yard, bought the supplies and installed it myself during Keller's naps. Proof that you can do anything you put your mind to! I don't mind having this one wall of faux shiplap and it was fairly easy to do but it certainly doesn't have the same unique charm of the original shiplap that's in the rest of the house. The pro of using new shiplap or faux shiplap is that it's easy to work with and lineup.

We really love our shiplap and at the end of the day it's what gave our house the old farmhouse feel that we are going for. It was worth preserving and it was fun to use it in some unexpected ways in our home.