Makeover Minute: Wallpaper Your Wood Paneling

Filed under: Your Home, Projects

Make that dated wall treatment disappear in a day.

Wood-paneled walls may be synonymous with interior design from the 1970s but that doesn't mean you won't find them in homes today. If your walls are still covered with wood paneling and you're ready for a change, we've got a plan for you.

You could remove it. But that's risky. To start, you don't know what lies behind it. There are reasons why people install wood paneling in the first place, and often times it's to cover up damaged walls (or no walls at all). Sometimes wood paneling is hung over studs, so you'll be unpleasantly surprised to find nothing beneath it. If hanging drywall isn't in the cards, our advice to you: Try wallpaper! (Yup, you can wallpaper over wood paneling.)


The process is actually quite simple, but there are a few extra steps to prepare the wall before you hang the paper. We asked the experts over at Ferm Living to give us tips on getting it right and then I went ahead and tried it myself.

First, I hit up my local hardware store and got some wood paneling -- I don't actually have wood paneling at home, so this was the next best thing. Then, I ordered wallpaper liner which will be used to smooth out the grooves in the paneling, creating a fresh, flat surface to work with.

Ferm Living's Christiana Coop explains, "Be sure to purchase extra heavy duty wallpaper liner in order to have the appropriate stiffness to truly hide the gaps between the wood panels. Wallpaper liner will likely work for gaps up to approximately 1/4-inch but anything larger might need to be filled with spackle." If you're a hardcore DIY-er, you can use spackling compound to completely fill the grooves and then sand them out.

You can also combine the two methods -- spackle and lightly sand (just enough to make it fairly smooth) and then apply wallpaper liner. Christiana says that spackling the deep grooves will "prevent the potential for poking a hole in the wallpaper in the gaps between the wood."

Here are Ferm Living's expert steps, which I followed to wallpaper my wood paneling:

1. Prepare the surface. If the wood paneling is glazed/varnished real wood or fake wood with a plasticized finish, this layer needs to be really roughed up with sandpaper to create a new surface with enough friction for the wallpaper paste and wallpaper to adhere. After sanding, rinse with sponge to remove any dust.


2. Apply wallpaper liner. Just remember that the liner is applied the same way as wallpaper but horizontally. If it isn't pre-pasted, use the same wallpaper paste as you will for the wallpaper. We recommend basic premixed wallpaper adhesive (it's available at most hardware stores and usually comes in a big plastic tub). Let dry 48 hours.

Should you decide to spackle instead, do that first, let dry and then sand the entire surface.



For the purposes of this article, I did not paper the entire piece of paneling so that you could see how well the liner and paper cover the grooves. The liner I chose specifically states that it should not be used on paneling or walls with grooves deeper than 1/4 inch.


3. Hang wallpaper! For the full instructions on how to properly hang wallpaper, view Ferm Living's informative video here.



If you want a textured look, Christiana says that it is possible to wallpaper into the wood paneling grooves using a squeegee, but there is a potential risk of tearing the wallpaper. She suggests that if you want to achieve this look, cut strips of wallpaper the width of the paneling and leave the grooves unpapered.

Looking for more unique wallpaper ideas? How about wallpaper in the bathroom or how to make wallpaper stripes and collages.

 

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