Living Room Remodel

If your house was built in the 80's like our home, you most likely have a room with fake wood paneling. Fortunately, Joanna Gaines helped popularize shiplap siding for the interior with her show, "Fixer Upper". While this wall paneling is no where near the level of quality as shiplap siding, you can embrace it and let the vertical lines of the paneling add elegant texture to your space.

Before

When we toured our home, I knew it had great bones. The interior just needed a little face lift. For the Living Room, we knew we wanted to keep the flooring untouched, so we focused our attention to the walls, and only the walls. Wall Paneling does require a coat of primer. Since the vertical grooves can be a challenge to paint, I recommend using a brush to paint the inside of the grooves before using a roller to paint the entirety of the wall.

The Paint

The goal for this room was to appear light and airy. Our decor is very light in color, so we thought the Living Room should reflect this. Once the walls were primed, which only required one coat, we used the following paint color and applied two coats.

• Sherwin Williams - Sea Salt - SW 6204

To maintain color consistency in our Home, we used the same kitchen cabinet color (Sherwin Williams - Pure White - SW 7005) to paint the built-in cabinets, shelves, and trim in the Living Room.

The Fireplace

We loved the stone of our fireplace, but thought it was slightly too dark for the room. Instead of painting it a solid color, we chose to apply a white-wash to the stone in order to enhance the true coloring of the stone.

What is a white-wash?

It's a mixture of water and paint in order to help thin out the thickness of the paint and help reveal the material texture that the paint is being applied to. I recommend a 1:1 ratio, adding a cup of water to a cup of paint using a large plastic mixing bowl. You will also want a few rags on hand as white-washing stone can get messy. In short, since the paint is now thinned out, streaks of it will start to run down the vertical surface, so simply dab the rag against the stone to stop the streaking as you paint.

As you white-wash, treat the process similar to painting. Start with one coat using a brush and paint each stone individually, dabbing any paint run off as necessary. Once you've painted all the stone and the grout, step back and determine if you want to add a second coat. Each time you add a coat of white-wash, it'll make the paint color thicker and the material color less noticeable, so it's up to you to decide your personal preference.

For our fireplace, I used a single coat of white-wash.

After