Shiplap Tutorial for Dummies

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So do we even need to talk about the girl crush millions of women have on Joanna Gaines????  This chick has made the shiplap farmhouse style travel from the heart of Texas to places like Las Vegas where there are no green pastures and goats running around.   I love her style BUT can’t let my house scream farmhouse living in the desert so we decided to do a small accent shiplap wall.   Now when I talk about the Doyles and DIY on a scale of 1 to 10 on a home improvement scale I’d say I am a negative 5 and my husband is a 1 (sorry honey).   We aren’t good at DIYs and have basically no skills when it comes to sawing, drilling, nailing, etc.   SOOOO this tutorial is truly for DUMMIES as we have NO EXPERIENCE with this stuff.

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A VERY UGLY BEFORE

First off we went to buy the wood at our local Lowes.    Now buying the wood was easy, getting it to our house was a whole other story….. 11 planks of wood, two toddlers and car seats, 100+ degree weather, and a car that was just slightly too small caused for several trips back and forth from Lowes to home.   I was all ready about to give up, but my hubby preserved breaking a major sweat in the Las Vegas heat.   At Lowes we also bought hole putty, a spatula thingy to apply it {yes that’s a technical term}, and white paint.

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Our major purchase for this project was this nail gun from Amazon.   If we already would have owned something like this {or could have borrowed one} it would have made this wall under 100 bucks to make.    We are hoping to get more uses out of this nail gun as my husband feel like he can take on the DIY world now.

My husband then moved the furniture and measured the wall and cut the wood to that length.   Next using the nail gun we attached the first piece of wood to the top of the wall.   Using quarters as spacers we alighted the next piece of shiplap and stapled.    Now this project {IF YOU DON’T HAVE KIDS} could take a few hours, but since we have two toddlers and couldn’t work during nap time because of noise issues it took us a couple of days….um weeks….   Imagine-sharp tools, a nail gun, and two screaming kids ready to get into everything.   Yea it wasn’t easy but we did it!   We finally got frustrated and asked for help and my dad came over to be an extra set of hands to hold the wood so I could distract the kids.  And the typical first timer DIY disaster took place….we ran out of nails….DIY fail.  

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SERIOUS GRANDFATHER, FATHER, SON BONDING TIME

Cut to the next weekend and a trip to Lowes to buy more nails we finished nailing the shiplap to the wall!   My hubby then measured the outlets holes and made those cuts.  They aren’t perfect but they will be covered by the TV stand anyways.

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After the wall was attached we then had to fill the holes with painters putty.   We found that teamwork was dreamwork here.   I used an old plastic knife to get the putty in the hole and the hubby came back to smooth it out with a putty knife.  This step was so quick!

The final step is to white wash!   We wanted a white wall but still wanted the wood features to show through so we mixed 2 parts paint and 1 part water together to make the ‘wash.’   Again we felt like teamwork made dreamwork here.   I painted on the paint/water mixture and my husband whipped off the excess with an old rag. Our toddler woke up and wanted to join the fun and she had a great time painting her own shiplap.   Our younger toddler woke up next which meant work time over-project pause again.

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We let one coat dry and after bedtime added a second and final coat of the whitewash.  And bam we were done!

Check out our time-lapse video of the final coat- Teamwork makes DREAMWORK!

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AFTER PHOTO!

Here is a photo of our finished project, I’m not sold on the décor around the TV, I want to get a large sign to hang above it but I think it turned out great!

SUPPLY LIST:
-Shiplap wood
-Nail gun: the one we purchased can be found HERE.

-Nails

-Saw

-Painter’s Putty: This can be purchased HERE.
-Putty Knife: This can be purchased HERE.

-White paint

I can’t believe we did this ourselves, so if the Redlocks crew can do it you can too!  What type of projects have you done to your home?

XOXO

Your Redlocks and Shamrocks Girl,

Lisa Doyle

*This post contains affiliate links.

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Two Books That Helped My Toddler STOP HITTING

Everything is a phase, everything is a phase. I repeated to myself to calm my nerves after being repeatedly stuck by my toddler.   At this daunting moment, a few months ago I had a child kicking and screaming, a red spot on my face, tears in my eyes and knew something had to change.  The ‘terrible twos’ were pretty rough for us-rough being a pretty big understatement.  Our little girl had many, many meltdowns.   She also has a challenge that only a few other toddlers have to deal with, a younger sibling that is less than a year and a half younger copying everything she does and wanting to play with all the same toys.   Thus ensued the meltdowns- I’m sad to even admit she started hitting me often and occasionally her younger brother.   This upset me a great deal to have her lash out and hit me over and over again.  I would cry my eyes out after being hit, scratched, and even had my hair pulled out by my own child.  I felt like a dog owner scared that their own dog might bite them.   We don’t hit in our house for punishment so I wasn’t even sure where she was picking this behavior up.     

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My first step as a mom with parenting troubles was to reach out to other parents.   Most of my mom friends have boys and weren’t seeing the same over dramatic and aggressive behaviors.   Some of the parents I talked to said “hit her back.”  This didn’t sit well with me, being an educator I know you can’t solve hitting with hitting- its like assigning writing for punishment.   I even reached out to one of my best friends who has a Master’s Degree in psychology for help.   After she reached out to some of her colleagues who deal with children we mostly got to a dead end that you don’t truly have a problem on your hands until the child is five.   My first thought was-I can’t live like this for three more years! 

I ended up trying to figure out why my daughter was frustrated and angry-when and why was she throwing these fits and hitting.   She was an early talker and has a great vocabulary for her age so I didn’t think it was a communication problem, it was a “control or express your anger problem.”   The teacher in me knows with a great story and positive reinforcement like I would use on my students for classroom management I could help my little girl work on this issue.    I ended up finding two great books No Hitting by Karen Katz and Keeping Your Cool: A Book About Anger by Carolyn Larsen on Amazon.  (Thank goodness for Amazon Prime!)  

   

These books were so great for my daughter to learn why we don’t hit AND what are good ways to express anger and frustration.    Those emotions we know as adults never go away but we can get them out.  Me personally, I get them out by getting in a good workout or dropping an F bomb because that can really calm me down, but as toddlers we don’t know how to appropriately express this anger.  I then found my mission, I needed to find ways for my toddler to get out those emotions in a healthy manner.   My daughter loves to read so I knew a fun new book could really open her eyes on this subject.    After a couple rocky months of doing positive reinforcement, time outs, and reading both of these books every so often (the book No Hitting my daughter has even memorized) I can say that I feel like we are over this hitting slash stage 10 nuclear meltdown-for now anyways.   These two books, No Hitting and Keeping Your Cool really helped us out and they are so inexpensive definitely give them a try!

XOXO

Your Redlocks and Shamrocks Girl,

Lisa Doyle

**This blog post contains affiliate links.   The thoughts, opinions, and writing about the products are my own.

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