It has come to my attention that I love a good accent wall. Which is why I decided to build a wood slat wall in my bedroom. Slat walls are all around the internet on Pinterest,Youtube, and Instagram. I also saw a slat wall on an episode of Fixer Upper and that decided it for me. I needed a slat wall in my life. They are a great easy way to add some texture and interest to a room .
Building a slat wall is easy enough and can definitely be done in a day. I jumped in with out researching how to build a wood slat wall ,but I learned some things along the way that would have been good to know prior to starting. Hopefully my mistakes can become your beautiful feature wall.
Materials:
- 1×2’s
- Corner Moulding (optional)
Choosing wood slats
For your wood material there are several options you have. You can go the super affordable route and buy some pine 1×2’s, sometimes called furring strips. These are around $3 a pop for an 8 foot piece. If you go this route it is going to take a little more prep on the front end as these pieces of wood generally need some sanding, and you will probably want to stain or paint them.
Or you can go the expensive route like I did. I bought red oak 1x2x8’s. The thinking behind this was that I was going to save my self a ton of time energy, but in the end I think it still would have been worth it to just sand and stain given how expensive this wall turned out to be. That being said, it really does look great so no regrets!
Preparing materials and wall
Before you get started there are a few things you will want to do to prepare. If you do these the wall will go up super quickly and hopefully easily.
First you will want to cut all of your slats down to size. I used my miter saw, it was relatively inexpensive and I use it all the time. If you don’t want to get a miter saw, I would suggest a miter box . It will just be a little more time consuming. My walls are 8ft tall I decided I wanted a half wall of slats. The slats were going to be place above the moulding so that the slats plus moulding would be a little taller than 4ft tall. I was okay with this though because I thought chopping the wall exactly in half might make the room look smaller. Unfortunately just because a piece of wood says it’s 8 ft long doesn’t mean this is accurate. I forgot this and ended up with some uneven slats of wood. My suggestion is to just measure every cut you make. It’s a little tedious ,but worth it to know that your wood is all going to be even.
This would be a good time if you wanted to paint your wall a different color as well. I’ve seen some really cool walls that had dark wall with light wood on top and it gives a really nice depth to the wall. The look I’m going for in my house is very light and airy so I left my wall gray matching the rest of the room.
At this point if you didn’t get super fancy like me and buy the expensive wood would the time to sand and stain. I would use an orbital sander to make this process go a lot faster. I sanded the edges of my slats where they were cut to get rid of any jaggedness. To save a little on stain/time I would also just stain the three sides of the slat that were going to be showing. My slats had stickers on some of them that were super hard to get off and if I did get them off there was residue left over, so instead of dealing with them I just left them and that side went against the wall.
Attaching the slats to the wall
Like I said once everything is prepped the wall goes up super quickly. About and hour or so depending on the size of your wall. To attach the slats to the wall I just used my nail gun and some 2 inch brads. I’ve seen people use liquid nails or liquid nails and brads. For me using just the brads worked out great and bonus, it was a lot less messy than adding an adhesive glue into the mix.
Spacing
Now you are going to have to decide how much space you want between your slats. I chose to use the side of a 1×2 as my spacer. This made it super super easy to get consistent spacing. If you want to do a different size I would just suggest rigging something up that you can use as a consistent spacer so your wall looks even. Use the piece of wood to press up the wood you are attaching to the wall to get and even and straight placement. As you are attaching your slats to the wall I would have a level handy.
After every few slats attached I would check to make sure that everything was still level. I did not do this so my wall is a little slanted towards the end. It really only takes one not level piece to throw the whole thing off, so learn from my mistakes! I just left it, it’s not super noticeable. I also did not want to have to pull out the brads and have extra holes in my wood.
At some point you might run into an electrical outlet or switch. You’ll just need to make a few special cuts for this. Measure from the top of where the slat should be down to the top of the outlet for one piece. Then measure down from the bottom of the outlet to the moulding for the second piece. I know that my bed will always be in front of the outlet so I skipped the bottom piece,because it will never be visible.
Adding moulding
Adding moulding to the top of a half slat wall is completely optional. I did it to mask some mistakes. In the end though I really like the look of it and it saved me from a lot of recutting off tiny pieces of wood because of my previously mentioned inaccurate cutting. I just bought some moulding to match my wood and attached it to the top of the slats using a few brads. The one area that needed to be joined I used some wood glue to hold the seam together. I’m a little disappointed in how the seam looks. It’s pretty noticeable, but I’m not really sure how I could have finished it differently. If you have any ideas leave them in the comments! I’d love to hear.
At first I did not plan on adding moulding to my slats. One thing to consider if you do decide in advance to add moulding is to place your brad nails high enough so that the moulding will cover them up once it is attached. Not a huge deal ,but it would have made the wall look that much cleaner.
It really is that easy to build a wood slat wall! Bonus it’s way less messy and adds more character to a room than just painting a wall.
