Our son's room was a total blank slate: light gray walls, white trim and absolutely no personality anywhere. When we bought this house all the blank slates excited me, but as we actually started to plan some areas and projects I was totally overwhelmed with all I wanted to do! Our son's room was the first of these overwhelming spaces.
I wanted to add textures and color and patterns but as I worked through different variations I just couldn't land on a concrete plan. So like any good DIY project, we just started anyway. Ha!
There was one piece of the design I was set on: beadboard! With the help of my in-laws, Parks and his dad did the heavy lifting of installing beadboard around the entire room.
Materials we used in our ~12ft x 14ft room:
- 8 sheets of 4ft x 8ft beadboard (we had the hardware store pre-cut these in half, saved so much time!)
- 8 pieces of 8ft trim
- 8 pieces of a thin 8ft 1 1/4th flat trim piece (we used this as a topper)
- Wood Putty
- Wood Adhesive
- Caulk
Tools needed:
- Circular Saw
- Jigsaw
- Drill Bit
- Nail Gun
- Long Level
- Sander and fine sandpaper
They finished this project in 2 days!! The first day they cut and put up all the beadboard sheets. On day two they added the trim piece directly to the top edge of the beadboard and then added a topper piece to finish the look.
The difference the beadboard added was so dramatic! Parks and I both said it felt like the room was giving us a hug and we loved that. The perfect first step!
Once I saw the beadboard intalled, all the other design elements fell into place. Before the weekend was over I had a color picked out, wallpaper ordered, and curtains/decor added to my cart!
Read about those decisions and my experience of hanging wallpaper for the first time in these post:
DIY: Painting Beadboard
DIY: Installing Peel and Stick Wallpaper
Want to skip to the good part? I posted all about the final reveal here:
At Home: Our Son's Room