Save Money Building Your Own Slat Wall

Wood

slat

wall

s are definitely in style right now and I really like them, but have you seen how much they cost? So today I'm going to show you how I built this one from scratch for less than 30% of what you can afford. buy yes, less than 30% this

wall

I just finished is in my bedroom the bed is going to rest on it is 3 and 1/2 M long and it took me a couple of days to complete but things started a few days before that, when I went to my local DIY store to buy these materials and by coincidence I saw some acoustic

slat

walls while I was there, which were not cheap and are made of a felt type material, but to my surprise, they also included the slats which is just a piece of fake wood strip glued to the front which seems a little cheap to me and also looks like it can be damaged easily and since I want to build a wood wall I want it to be made out of wood.

I'm a bit old fashioned so I chose some nice straight pieces of pine and three sheets of 9mm MDF. I chose 9mm just to save weight. I'm going to use this as a backing and it really doesn't have to be that strong, but once I have all the materials and I get back to the shop and get on with the proper work, I'm going to make the slats by cutting CLS three at a time and out of each piece I think I can get four ribbons. I've done a little test here on a piece I had lying around in the shop and it ends up around 44mm wide by 12mm or half an inch thick which I think is about the perfect size and I can get four of these of each piece from CLS at the moment, 3 for two is around £350 each so if I can get four of these in one piece that makes this cost around P90, alternatively if you don't want to do any work actually you can go and buy something ready made that is already cut and folded.

Unfortunately I just bought this from my local DIY store and it cost me over 4 so 90 for something you have to do. cut it

your

self or 4 if you want to buy it ready made now it means you need a table saw if you are going to do it this way if you don't have a table saw listen to the end when it goes We have looked at the

money

and costs of all this work and I may have a solution for you. I think it's time to start reducing this. It will take me about an hour. I'm going to get very dusty and dirty.

I guess I just have to bite the bullet, put on the mask and make some sawdust with a little trial and error. It's not that difficult to set the cut, so you end up getting four equal strips of wood from a piece of 3, but two. You also don't need to worry about curved edges on both sides because you can even plan them in the next step or place them on the back of the wall, which you'll see later hides them from view in the final product. When cutting softwood here, it is important to wear a dust mask to protect

your

self as I do, although I also have the vacuum attached to the floor.

I check regularly that I'm making consistent width cuts and work through the 18 3 by two pieces I just bought so I really need to maintain that mass of dust, that wasn't too bad, it was about 45 minutes of cutting. Now I have four times more wood than before, but it's only a little. a little smaller each and I'm completely covered this week. I'm definitely going to have to take a bath, so now each one has a pretty nice smooth edge on each side, but I need one of these sides to be nice and and to do that I'm going to have to use a manual electric toothbrush because I don't have one. one of those big planing machines that all the carpenters use and that go through all their wood, so I'm just going to use a normal planer. electric hand plane only on one side of each of these, so even more sawdust, as much as I would like to have a thickness folder like the proper carpenters, I wouldn't use it much and I know it would end up in the corner Cor. covered in dust, so today I will have to use a hand planer while I do this.

I am well aware that every time I stop the planer on the wood and pull it back, I am probably cutting a deeper section that I will have to remove in the sanding process even though my relatively new planer gives an excellent finish because it has nice new sheets, it's not perfectly smooth and I still need to sand the face to get rid of all the little ridges while I do this. I can also spot areas where the plane has stopped in the wood and with the sander on its edge I can sand them down and remove the bottom sections.

I finally finished all the cutting, planing and sanding and now I have 70 long 8T strips of very smooth wood, I must say it turned out very well, in fact the final dimensions are 38 mil wide, not 44. I don't know about where I took that out for 12 1 12 millimeters deep or about half an inch and I've placed a little bit here. the bench with about 18 mil or 3/4 gaps in the middle is made of plies because I'm trying to determine what size MDF board to cut to mount them. I'm going to have a number of boards that will eventually do it.

It looks like just one big wall and I'm thinking 2T wide or 600, but it depends exactly on the spacing between these slats. I have a small mockup here because, in parallel to all these cuts, I have been thinking. on what color to stain the wood and I ended up with something pretty light like this type of light oak and I finally got full approval from the client last night too and this also shows what I'm trying to achieve. I have an MDF back covered with some black fabric pinned to the back and then the slats in the front, but pinned from the back to this 3/4 space, so it's like a mini version of what I'm trying to do.

I need to figure out exactly what width of MDF I need to cut, cut it on the table saw and then I think I need to follow up with some stain as well. I bought four sheets of MDF here, but they are not easy to maneuver and go through the table saw, so I would recommend getting them from a store that can cut them to size, as my final dimension turned out to be exactly 600mm, which gave you It gives the slats a good overlap and from the top of my baseboard to the ceiling is about an inch less than the length of the board, so I also have to trim a little from the end of each of the six stains .

Obviously, it's totally up to you, but I still like it and prefer it. oil-based stains and after giving everything a coat and leaving it for a few minutes I can remove the excess knowing that I won't have streaks or stains to make the background black. I bought some cheap black material from the range and stapled it tightly around the back of the fences and then the stained slats can be fitted with the first one overhanging the edge 12mm or a piece of half ply which I cut off with a spacer . Then I can set this very well. from behind and with this straight and secure, all my other slaps can come out of this as a reference using the 3/4 in the spaces in between and then I clamp everything in place.

I'm doing this because I want to pin them. from the back, which is hard to do if you're also trying to fasten them from the front, obviously I'm using a nailer here, but you can do it by hand or even use screws on each board. I have left two ribbons. unfixed so you can use these areas to fix the board to the wall and then re-fix the battens once in place hidden in the fixings for installation. I start in the corner and since the adjacent wall is not completely vertical I add a black stripe. from ndf, one of my cuts that will act as a shadow gap, so the first slap is slightly away from the wall and will make it harder for the eye to compare to the other Clum wall.

I initially support the board on the Slide It and then use my clamps to push it firmly against the ceiling and my laser level just to make sure it is absolutely vertical before marking the fixing holes and drilling the wall plugs. There's not much load on these compared to mounting something heavy like a TV on the wall, so just the standard plugs I think are good enough. I just cut one of the boards around the outlet I have in the middle of the wall just to allow me to use it and also knowing that it will actually end up behind the bed and unseen and then it's just a repetitive process working along the wall using the gaps to ensure the gaps are absolutely consistent, so while Stuart gets on with the work let's take a look at this 3.5M long wall, I bought 18 pieces of 32 CLS at £350 each.

I also needed three sheets of MDF at 25 each and 8m of black fabric which cost me £25 in total. I also bought wood stain and a few bits of fixings total for less than 200 or about 33b. for a 600mm or 2T wide panel, if I then compare it to panels that are already made these start around 120 for wood or 90 for fake wood which would cost me for this project over £700 which means I now have a saving of at least £500 and I mentioned at the beginning that if you don't have your own table saw there may be an alternative with a saving of over £500.

The alternative is to use that savings to invest in some tools and buy a table saw and a planer and an impact drill and even a sander with the

money

that you have saved, which will then benefit you for several years and is something that I always recommend, which is to buy everything to fulfill a purpose and build a project. Anyway, getting back to the installation with a final piece of trim installed, I can then attach the missing slats that hide all the fixings on each panel with small oval nails that I then bury just below the surface with a punch to make it the last ribbon. and I think it turned out very well.

I like the color and I really like the way it is so regular that you can't see the seams between the different panels. The black material turned out absolutely perfect because I was quite careful with the depth. of each slat when I was putting them up and using something like 3/4 inch means that the gaps are absolutely perfect and regular throughout the War, so I'm very pleased with that and I think it looks absolutely stunning, so it's a good start to this. bedroom makeover so I hope you enjoyed this video, remember, subscribe, hit that bell notification on patreon, all that kind of stuff and I'll see you next time.