DIY Herringbone Wall

Happy Sunday everyone!

Today Allen and I are sharing how we made the herringbone feature wall for Hudson’s nursery! I wanted to do something fun for this room. I searched through wallpapers, shiplap designs, and I finally came across this idea on Pinterest and knew this is what I wanted to do for the main wall! This room used to be our office and all of the walls were painted grey. We re-painted 3 of the walls white in the color Snowbound by Sherwin Williams. For the feature wall I knew I wanted a blue but I didn’t want a BABY blue, I wanted it to be kind of subtle. 6 paint samples later and I finally found the perfect shade that is kind of a dusty blue/grey called Silvermist by Sherwin Williams and I’m so happy with the color! Allen did 95% of the work for this project so I’m having him type out the materials/steps 😜. If you have any questions please let us know! I can’t wait to start getting our baby boys furniture in here and to get everything set up!

Materials:

Measuring tape
Pencil
Painters tape
Protective plastic sheeting for the floors
¼’’ x 1’’ wood boards (We needed 18 boards for our project) The ones we purchased from Lowe’s are these.
Miter Saw (makes this project way easier), could also use a circular saw.
Level
Hammer (or a nail gun)
Small trim nails
Indoor white trim caulking
Caulking gun
Sanding blocks
Paint
Paint brushes

Steps:

Measure your wall (height and width)

2. Decide how many vertical boards you’ll want in your pattern. We divided our wall into 4 sections with 3 vertical boards (plus the 2 boards on the left and right edge). If you don’t have crown molding you might want to go ahead and frame out the top and bottom as well.

3. Mark with a pencil where the vertical boards will go. Now time to start hanging boards. First place the vertical boards over where you marked for them to go. Put a nail first at the bottom of the board. Then with your level, make sure the board is perfectly vertical and place a nail at the top. Then place a few more nails along the board to make it flush with the wall. We unfortunately couldn’t find boards that would run the full height of our wall, so we had to cut small pieces to finish the vertical run. To do this we slid a second board next to the newly hung board, and measured and marked with a pencil where we would need to make the cut. Use the same technique of nailing and leveling if you have to take this extra step. Repeat this over each vertical mark and don’t forget to also do this on the sides of your wall! We painted the 2 boards for the left and right side before nailing to the wall but you don’t have to!

4. Now decide the extent of your herringbone pattern. We made a more spaced out pattern with 4 herringbone boards to create 5 sections.

5. Now more math, divide your wall’s vertical measurement by how many herringbone boards you want. Use your measuring tape and mark where the herringbone boards will make contact with the vertical boards. This may be a confusing step. Basically take the measurement you got from dividing the vertical height by the number of herringbone boards, and make marks over where each vertical board will go.

- Our wall is 99” tall, and we were using 4 boards, so 99 divided by 4= 24.75”. So every 24.75” down we made a horizontal pencil mark.

6. Now take your painters tape and make staggered connections to the marks you just made (basically to visualize your herringbone pattern)

7. Now time to hang the herringbone boards. If you have a protractor use that for sure, but we didn’t have one! To figure out the angle we needed to cut the boards at we held a board over the painters tape pattern that we had laid out, and then marked where the vertical board intersected (basically where we needed to make our cuts). I then adjusted our miter saw to the pencil mark angle that I had just estimated, and I kept the saw at this angle for the other cuts in that section. If you’re using a circular saw, just do your best to estimate and mark each board! I started on the very left bottom side and held it at the perfect angle so it hit the bottom of the next vertical board and the wall. I marked off the line and realized that the angle I needed for my room was 22.5 degrees. Once you figure this out the rest is pretty simple!

- Pro tip: cut one board at a time. You’ll need to estimate and mark each herringbone bone so that you get the correct length. I definitely wasted a couple of boards figuring this out and trying to cut too many at one time.

8. Now move on to the next section following your taped pattern. A tip at this point is to make sure that the pattern is at the same level as the other sections before nailing the boards down. For the second section, you’ll need to switch the degrees to the opposite side. So for me, I turned it from the 22.5 degrees on the right side, to the 22.5 degrees on the left side. This is because you’re working with the opposite angle now!

9. Repeat the herringbone steps until all boards are hung

10. Now grab your caulk/caulking gun and put a small amount of the caulking in each seam. This is where teamwork comes in. The person who’s not caulking should follow the other and use their finger to make the seam flush and uniform. This step takes some practice. Don’t forget to cover the joints/seams where the boards meet!

- PS: using your finger to smooth the caulk is probably not how the pros do it but it’s what we did and it still worked out 😅

11. After letting all the caulking dry, take the sanding blocks and make sure the boards are nice and smooth. We didn’t spend a lot of time on just this just quickly sanded the boards and you really just need to focus on sanding over the joints (where the boards meet each other) and lightly over the seams.

12. Now time to paint. We did two coats which gave it a nice finish

13. Clean up and admire your new wall!