Hey buddies!
Excited to share the next tip in the Farmhouse Hacks series,
and if you missed the other two, I’ll link those below for ya:

Farmhouse Hacks – Concrete Countertops + Farm Sink
Farmhouse Hacks – Wood Look Tile Flooring 

Next up, we’ll chat a little bit about getting that farmhouse look using DIY shiplap on a budget!  While I would love to line my walls with the real deal, sometimes budgets don’t match up with our big ideas, so that’s where this less-expensive alternative comes in.  We used this shiplap hack in our dining room, to surround our fireplace and kitchen island, and it’s even found it’s way out into my she shed office!

In order to get the shiplap look with a small investment, we used a product called pine underlayment which you can find at any hardware store.  It comes in large sheets, and we just had the helpful workers at Home Depot cut it into strips that were 8 inches by 8 feet long each.  If the workers can’t strip the sheets down for you, a simple at-home session with a table saw would do the trick.

The underlayment runs around $14 per 4×8 sheet, and you can get 6 strips of “shiplap” from one sheet.  To cover the same amount of square feet using real deal shiplap, you’d need to be ready to pay anywhere from $60-80 depending on the type of wood you chose.  Again, I love the real thing…but we were on a serious budget when we made updates to our home a few years ago, and this inexpensive farmhouse hack did the trick for now!

Before installation, we sanded down the edges and corners of the boards by hand to remove snags and splinters, and the we used a nail gun to attach.  We used a couple of quarters to give us semi-uniform spacing between planks, but  I wanted it to feel as rustic and authentic as fake shiplap can feel in a new-ish build home, ha!  😉 I even left many of the nail holes showing from installation instead of filling them to add to the charm and character.  To join the corners and seams, we just tacked on cut-to-size strips of corner molding [HERE].  And just ignore the multiple white paints in this pic…..we hadn’t painted our new trim when I took the picture, oops!!

The only drawback that we encountered using this farmhouse hack was that because the underlayment is a bit thin, some of the boards bowed a bit after a few coats of paint (Sherwin Williams Alabaster, fyi).  Nothing big, and we just tacked one or two more nails in the center of the boards that bowed slightly.  Actually, if we’d nailed the boards down in that spot in the first place, maybe nothing would have even happened.  So, just an FYI if you think about doing this hack!  The money it saved and the look we got for the small price tag was worth a few extra nails after we finished painting.  😉

Hope this series on inexpensive farmhouse hacks has been helpful to you, and let me know if you have any questions in the comments!
❤️Erin