Slat Wall Part 2: Measuring and Building

The implementation of the slat wall was rather scary. Wood is expensive (nice wood gets priced by the foot) and because it is expensive (and we do not have a storage warehouse handy in our house) we bought only 20% more than we thought was necessary. Which meant that making a lot of mistakes could result in running out of wood. Which came from a specialty lumber yard, so we could not just pick up more from Home Depot.

Also the ceiling of the living room is one of the (few) areas in the house that we have not painted. So mistakes in installation that damage the ceiling (paint) would cause even more downstream costs and disruption. Fun.

The design is quite simple. Board on top, with dados (channels) cut through. Matching board on bottom with dados. Attach vertical boards in the channels and voila! Easy, right?

The dados were cut by our CNC machine. Since "0.75 inches" in the computer is not necessarily 0.75 in reality, the first spacer boards were cut in the same pine we prototyped the wall in. It took a few iterations to get the width correct. 

This gave us another chance to check out the 2:1 spacing with the actual boards. It seemed OK, so we proceeded by cutting the spacers for real.

Now that we were close to the real installation, we had another problem: finding a ceiling joist. Ideally we wanted the slat wall to be anchored into a structural part of the house. But this part of the house is extra fun because the walls and ceiling are plaster. With metal mesh in the plaster. So the technique of using a magnet to find drywall screws is useless. In fact a magnet sticks to most of the ceiling. A stud finder does not find anything either. Since we wanted the slat wall as close to the door as possible that also limited the placement. We...never found the joist. Instead we used drywall anchors and cut the vertical boards as close to flush as we could manage to provide a little bit of tension.

Here we go--point of no return!

The first board, on the ceiling, aligned using fancy lasers:

You can see how most of the boards are the perfect height. Clamps and scrap wood were around to keep the boards from falling out.

As we installed each vertical board, sometimes we had to fit them  into different slots than the one we intended (as being off by a mm was noticeable). But since the living room height dropped between the front door and the rest of the room (yay old houses...), cutting a board too short just meant we used it closer the dining room.

The cross line laser level was crucial to getting the slat wall plumb. Especially as the room is very not plumb. In fact the height from one end to the other...is not the same (which is why we never even considered building it as one unit in the garage and moving it in). These two pictures are about a couple of feet apart (2421 vs. 2427 mm). Each vertical board had to be custom-cut to match.

We decided to place the slat wall in between the switch plate and window as putting it to the left of the switch plate would take up a lot of valuable living room space. You can see how the slat wall is not in alignment with the vertical window trim. Because of the laser we know the slat wall is perfectly straight.

Once we got the first pair of ceiling and floor spacers installed, the slats went up at a fairly quick pace.

The last detail was figuring out how to trim around the ceiling and floor spacers. We could not leave it un-trimmed as the boards are just held in by tension (or not at all if they were a little short).  

It would have been easiest to use a "fat trim." Also the most secure. But this would create a major issue with upkeep as dust, pet hair, etc. would accumulate in the bottom and be really hard to clean out. 

So we did the fiddly thing and ripped boards (meaning sheered off some of the width instead of using the whole 3" board) to match the thickness of the ceiling and floor spacers. It was surprisingly difficult to get the trim attached. D used a nail gun to hold the trim up and the wood was so dense (or his technique so poor) that the nails frequently failed to go all the way through the board and he had to hand nail them flush. Plus there was a bit of waviness and the trim wasn't 100% even with the boards. One major fun part of working in wood is that you cannot just slap some caulk and paint in to cover imperfections. Still, we ended up with lovely mitered corners and top and bottom trim at the same height as the spacers (meaning an even plane to dust, rather than something with a dust-catching well):

Then it was onto the next major phase - installing hooks! But that's a story for next time.

Slat Wall Part 1: Prep Work

I think we're at an all-time low for our "before" picture--I had to get a couple screen grabs from an old video for photographic evidence of the way this part of the living room has looked for literally over a decade: piano, torchiere floor lamp, messy coat rack:

For years D has wanted to get the piano off of that wall. It is the "entryway" and really seemed like a bad place for the piano, not to mention the fact that it was right up against our baseboard heating, which was bad both for the piano and for allowing the heat to get into the house. Plus we really needed more storage.  Creating some kind of wall would help us be able to get rid of that tippy, cluttered coat rack without losing all the coat storage. We had an IKEA Expedit behind the sofa (see this older picture, used a few times already including here):

But this only gave us a few cubbies, especially because we deliberately left some cubes open to avoid making the entry way too dark.

We debated a few options:

1. Pony wall (waist high free standing drywall)
2. Different furniture
1. More and bigger IKEA Expedit (now called Kallax)
2. IKEA Pax
3. Vitsoe 606
3. Slat wall

The pony wall was dropped fairly quickly as they are fairly deep (since you need 2x4 + drywall) and not very functional. The more/bigger Expedit / Kallax was dropped as it doesn't allow for hanging clothes. Pax (wardrobe) would create a fairly deep literal wall and would take away a lot of space and light. The Vitsoe 606 is quite expensive (though they seem to hold 100% of their value) and we thought it could give more of a "did we just enter a SoHo clothing store" vibe? 

That left a slat wall, which had the advantages of taking very little space, allowing for light to filter, and giving some flexibility on how / where to hang coats. The major disadvantage being that it would need to be custom-built. 

But before really starting several important questions needed to be answered: dimensions of the wood, the spacing of the slats, and what kind of wood. First, D did a lot of measuring and then some mock-ups with cheap pine, mostly to convince himself (and me) that it was not crazy. Here's the entry view with the initial framing (all press fit, i.e. just held in place with friction) in place for what the space was potentially going to become. 

With the project given the green light (by me), the piano found its new home in the sun room, which really is a much better home for it:

Then we moved our Expedit against the now-empty piano wall (and, cats being cats, this guy had to inspect the area fist):

And now, with the space behind the love seat empty, the project could begin. D continued to use the pine boards for more testing and measuring. We tried a few different variations for the spacing of the boards to get a sense of what we liked. We ended up deciding on roughly a 2:1 opening-to-slat ratio.

D also worked with a few lumber yards and settled on a couple options to consider for our final product. He ordered samples of sapele ("African") mahogany (bottom, the redder/warmer one) and American walnut (top) to see what matched our existing furniture and space:

Hopefully you can see in addition to comparing the wood color itself, we tested how it would look stained/oiled. The left/lower side of each board shows each wood with Danish Oil on it, and the right/upper part shows it completely bare.

We decided on the warmer, redder sapele as the existing cabinets in the kitchen and living room had some of those hues. We ordered quarter-sawn S4S (finished on all sides) 1x6 boards. We paid them to rip most of the 1x6 boards in half to create 1x3 as doing it ourselves would have been annoying. 

And just like that, we were ready to begin...

Princess Desk and Room

This princess room clearly needed a desk space for the little student. As with the rest of the room, the built-ins and the knee walls with doors to our storage cubbies meant that there wasn't a lot of space to work with, so D decided that this built-in should come out and a custom desk would go in. 

Demolition was surprisingly easy, so we didn't get any pictures of it. Just about everything could be pulled by hand or with a pry bar. There were spots that made us go "huh" though, as with any old house. We learned that the trim on the outside of the built-in was higher than the trim on the inside, which wasn't noticeable until we removed the vertical framing. D trimmed a piece from the front of the built-in to fit and inserted it, plus fitted a piece of wood trim. The floor also had missing pieces, and you can see from this picture that he added a small rectangle to fill in where the vertical front pieces of the built-in had been set into the floor:

We found a deeply discounted desk pedestal from Ballard Designs and then created a ledge to the height of that pedestal by screwing some pine boards around the perimeter into the studs. 

The most challenging (well, scary) part of the whole process was measuring over and over and then cutting the $99 "Floor and Decor" butcher block countertop to the right width. Then ripping it (shearing off a thin slice/plane) as it was a bit too deep for desk usage. The Bosch track saw made it a fairly easy process to make it thinner. Then D eye-balled a few different roundover bits we owned and ran a hand-held router across the front and side edge to give a nice rounded effect. He finished with Danish oil. He started with a very old can which was a huge mistake as it just went on sticky. And stayed sticky. So he had to run some mineral spirits across the board to de-sticky it. Then finish it again with a new(er) can. Still took several very smelly days in the basement (as it was winter there was no hope of using the outside or garage to cure) to get the smell in a sort of OK state--enough to put in a bedroom. For a while, we could smell it (from the basement) in most of the main floor of the house:

The middle hole in the floor was especially challenging to fill in because it got wider as you went deeper. I guess the contractor wanted some wiggle room when they installed the original bench / shelves. It was far too thin at the edges to keep as is, so D took a chisel and carefully widened the hole until the existing wood felt sturdy enough. Then he used some leftover oak flooring from our primary suite addition and cut it to friction-fit into the spot. The finish of course does not match, but no one is likely to notice until the next homeowner or future us rips out the desk.

And here it is, in all its glory. There's a charging station (I think my kids have more devices than I do) and lots of space to work (at least when she puts her junk away).

Without further ado, the rest of the room. You'll recognize the dressers and the bed, now with optional canopy attachment, from the guest room. Moving it up here is what allowed us to empty that room out and put in a Murphy bed instead. (The kids both knew it was now-or-never on this bedroom set--either one of them was taking it or it was going to be sold off.) This was my canopy bed and furniture set from the 1980s and apparently the multitudes of unicorn and Strawberry Shortcake canopies of my era just do not exist anymore. (I think they can be a health hazard because of how dusty they can get--so I try to shake this one off and dust the frame when I change the sheets.) This was one of very few I could find on Amazon, but fortunately, the room recipient loves it.

And of course we added another special touch to make the room even more magical:

And so as we enter 2026, I think I have finally caught up with all the bedroom upgrades that we made as a result of the new addition (guest room and both kid rooms). This all took place primarily in the last few hectic months of 2024, so you can see why we were too busy "doing" to be "writing."

Closet for a Princess

 OK well, apparently that was post 498, hahaha. I had two draft posts lurking from 2022, which I just found, affecting the overall post count. That's a little disappointing, but oh well. I definitely have at least two more posts up my sleeve (and hopefully many more), and I don't plan to update the last one with "actually I lied."

A year and a few months late, let's get into it on the room formerly known as the nursery. Here it is, in its green glory after we moved the Stuva wardrobe out.

Did we have to paint these walls, where the closets were going to be installed? D insisted that we did not, because they would be hidden by the build-in closets. However, I had to make sure the green was gone EVERYWHERE. It should come as no surprise that it took quite a bit of primer to get rid of that bright green.

Obviously the rest of the room needed to be painted as well. I took a moment of silence before painting over this mural (with a LOT of primer--even more than the green:

All gone (my babies are growing up!):

The room's recipient also wanted normal white ceilings, much to my dismay (the clouds were always something I wanted as a kid, but clearly not something my own kids wanted--oh well). So here is Sherwin Williams premium ceiling paint tinted Pure White (she allowed me to keep the clouds on the tiny ceiling in the dormer, so they're not gone entirely):

We bought many paint samples from Samplize, which we figured would be a huge upgrade from buying tiny bits of paint and slapping it on the wall. It was great until we pulled some of the hallway paint off removing the stickers...(note that we could not test the stickers in the green room, since the greenish glow would definitely affect the way the colors looked):

She went with Appleblossom, the least "pink" pink (the second up from the bottom) at our recommendation, since we learned our lesson on the green...the brightest color is probably not the best choice.

For a while, the room looked like this, partially painted just enough to start the closet installation.

After a little math work we saw that we could easily fit two Ikea Pax side by side and a have a bit of space behind the door. But....that would require jamming the right Pax against the right wall. Which has a dormer ceiling. So we figured with some sawing, it could forced in. 

The first step was remove the baseboard trim so the Pax could go as flush as possible to the back wall. 

D didn't want the Pax wardrobe totally flush against the  side wall because he was concerned it would be hard (or maybe impossible?) to open the wall-side door enough. Plus it would help to have something solid to attach the side of the wardrobe to, rather than drywall. Especially as he would need to install it in a ... non-standard way because of the extra sawing. 

So D held up the right-side board against the lowest part of the dormer and scratched a line onto the board. Then took it to the track saw and cut the edge. Which fortunately did not shatter as he cut it.  

He used some shims to wedge it all in tight. 

He did the same for the ceiling board - and also had to wedge in a scrap piece of 2x4 to hold it up.

The doors were VERY annoying as they were about an inch too tall to just fit as is. So I had to cut them all a little bit shorter. Then do a very sloppy job covering the top edge up with some leftover mat board, wood glue, and nails. 

Because we used the the 93in PAX doors with the 79in cabinet to line up near the top, D also had to cut a new set of hinge holes:

Getting sort of close!

But there were still a lot of little things to do. Spackling in gaps and installing some new trim (with pine wood quarter round) primed, then painted in semi-gloss Benjamin Moore Simply White. Which some random blog posts claimed was a good match for Ikea white. Which it sort of is (the top is the PAX door, the bottom is the painted trim).

Scrap pieces of the door and sides were used to fill in the top right triangle. Here it is, finished:

Of course we have some features on the inside like some internal PAX drawers, shelves, and bar as well as this custom this hair clip and bow board:

The left side required another scrap piece to close the top of the side (due to the shorter PAX unit and the taller PAX door, pictured above). We primed and painted it with the pink wall paint. 

You'll also see another addition to the left of the closet. Yup, this lucky kid got custom shelving too. It was a small amount of space to the side that didn't fit any ready-made furniture, but seemed perfect for displaying LEGOs (especially since the cats wouldn't find it easy to climb). We started with our favorite shelf base, the Container Store's elfa, which we've used in the living room, office closet, and linen closet. And like in the living room, we opted for our own shelving instead of using the elfa's line. 

D designed and cut a shape with a CNC that would make the most of the space available, with rounded corners so no one poked their eye out. 

The height is adjustable so we can set it to the height of whatever item she wants to display.

We have one more big project in the room and then can show the whole thing off!