How to Create a Plank Accent Wall: Master Bedroom Transformation Guide

This master bedroom plank accent wall was long in the making but man, was she worth the wait.

Until we did this project, our house palette was pretty light and neutral – white kitchen, greige walls, wood accents. I knew I wanted to start bringing in a few darker, more accent-type colors throughout the house but knew Alex would never go for a black wall in our bedroom.

Not one to be deterred, I spent months sneakily pinning a thoughtful and strategic mix of both dark and light accent plank walls to our joint home inspo Pinterest board to plant the seed and I’m pleased to say it took me less than a year to master this marriage thing because it worked! Well, that and me presenting the reasoning that a plank accent wall would actually save us work because we could take out the unwanted door way on the bedroom wall that went to our mudroom and, instead of trying to match the paneling that was on that wall, we could just nail up some plywood and plank over the top of it to hide it.

We went back and forth on whether to have a dark accent wall and a white color on the rest of the walls or a white plank wall but we didn’t want it to look too cottage-y or farmhousey with the white planks, so dark it was.

Between the color choice and cutting the planks thicker than most shiplap-type walls, we got the more master bedroom plank accent wall look we were going for and we spent weeks afterwards casually walking by our open bedroom door to marvel at it multiple times a day. We’re losers like that.

Tools and materials

• Plywood
• Circular saw or table saw
• Clamps 
• Sander
• Nail gun
• Wood glue 
• Wood filler
• A couple of pennies, for spacing
• Primer 
• Paint – We used about a gallon of Behr Marquee Chimney Matte Interior Paint
• Paint rollers + handle
• Trim

How We Did It

Measure multiple times. You’re going to want to measure the height and width of your entire wall a couple of times if you want to avoid an argument in the plywood aisle of Lowe’s.

With that measurement, figure out how thick you want your plywood planks to be and how many of them will evenly fit within the height measurement of your wall, accounting for the tiny gap between each plank (we used a penny for this as an indication of how small a gap we’re talking about between each of them.)

For us, our planks were 9.5 inches thick and we needed 10 of them to fit in the wall height measurement. Our wall is 171.5 inches wide so one single piece of plywood wouldn’t stretch that whole way across. A lot of plank/faux shiplap tutorials will tell you to stagger the seams of the planks for aesthetic reasons but because we wanted the planks to eventually look like one big piece running across the whole wall, we made each plywood plank the length of half the wall so there would be just one uniform seam running down the middle we could fill in later.

In the photo above, you can see a seam where the two sides meet. That’s where we wood filled and then sanded over so it looked like one continuous plank.

So, we ended up with 20 planks that were 9.5 inches tall and 85.75 inches wide to make 10 rows when assembled on the accent wall.

Cut Your Planks

If you’re super new to DIY and don’t own a saw of any kind yet, home improvement stores will probably cut the plywood sheets into planks for you but be warned that in our experience their give-a-shit level about the straightness and accuracy of cuts is not the highest.

It’s definitely worth it to invest in a circular or table saw if you’re planning on doing more DIYs in the future – here’s our post on what we got started with.

We used the very high-end method of clamping the large plywood pieces to our dining room table with a plastic dropcloth underneath because it was raining the entire weekend we worked, but we would recommend doing this outside if possible.

We measured out the lines to cut, then held up our circular saw blade to the line, measuring the distance between the blade and the edge of the base plate then we clamped down a straight piece of wood to the plywood as a guide so Alex could keep the saw straight while he cut.

This gif shows the gap you need to account for clamping your guide piece of wood for the circular saw. Our blade is 1.25″ from the edge of the base plate.

We also clamped the piece of plywood to our table so the whole thing wouldn’t move while we worked, which we learned the hard way.

From there, it’s just the monotonous (and loud) work of cutting down about 20 planks which doesn’t actually take too long once you’ve marked your lines and get into the rhythm of moving the clamps each time.

Sand the Edges

Once the planks are all cut, give the edges and whichever side will be the front a good sanding. Because we used cheaper plywood, it wasn’t very smooth when we bought it and it needed some attention before we put them onto the walls.

Make sure to use a mask for this step because it can get pretty sawdusty.

Pro tip: Paint the wall underneath before you start nailing to the wall!

We didn’t do this and I kind of hate us for it, but if we were to do this again we would definitely give the wall underneath and the tops and bottoms of the planks a quick coat of paint before starting the nailing process. Once everything is all glued and nailed in place, those little penny-sized spaces may not seem very big, but they’re enough to show a little of the wall underneath and I would honestly rather give up use of one of my limbs for a month than to use a teeny tiny craft paintbrush and get in those crevices to fill in the paint again.

Glue, nail, repeat

This is where the action happens, and it goes pretty quick from here on. It took us probably only an hour to actually nail up the panels once we’d cut and sanded them.

Because we live in an old house, approximately zero of the ceilings or floors are level which has posed a problem and hurt our brains more times than we can count by now.

For that reason, we started with the planks closest to the ceiling and worked our way down, under the assumption it would be more noticeable if we got to the end and needed to fill in or cut off part of a piece at the top than it would be at the bottom where our bed and nightstands would hide the problem anyway.

You’re going to want to slather on wood glue like a Southerner with a side of Ranch dressing, but be careful not to get it too close to the edges or it’ll seep down and dry with drips.

The nailing step will probably require two people unless you’re good at multitasking and are steady-handed. I held the wood panels in place while Alex was on a step ladder with the nail gun. You don’t need too many nails to hold it in place but if you see a spot where it’s not laying flat then shoot one in there for good measure. Don’t be shy about it.

Like I said earlier, we had two pieces for each row with a seam in the middle, so we really made sure to push the pieces super close together in the middle and make that join as small as possible, even if it meant leaving a little space in the corners of the wall (they were covered with trim in the end to hide any uneven bits, anyway).

To start the next row, we held a penny between the nailed-in piece and the next piece we were working on to make sure we’d have consistent spacing and from there we just kept gluing and nailing until we had worked the whole way down the wall.

One last prep step then let that big, bold beauty come to life

I spent probably an hour after we’d finished pressing wood filler in that middle seam and into the seemingly endless nail spots Alex had made during his new tool power trip. It’s boring work, but makes a huge difference in the end so don’t skip this step.

You can see in the photo above the wood filler starts out pink then turns white/wood colored as it dries.

Once the wood filler is dry, sand it all down flat (while wearing a mask) and wipe down the whole wall with a cloth to get rid of the dust that will most certainly be stuck to your walls and ruin your paint job.

Next, put on a coat of primer to ensure even, smooth coverage of the paint – another step that’s worth your time for the end product.

Now finally it’s onto painting.

We chose the color Chimney by Behr. We were looking for a muted, not-too-stark black color which is surprisingly hard to find. We liked that Chimney didn’t look like we were only going to blast My Chemical Romance and scream at our mothers from behind our side bangs in that room, but it does look kind of blue/navy in the daylight.

We used a brush to go along the horizontal cracks and along the top, bottom and corners of the accent wall – called ‘cutting in’ if you wanna use fancy DIYer words – before we took the roller to the whole thing. We ended up using two coats of paint even though we’d primed because the dark color we’d picked still showed a little of the white primer after coat one.

She was looking noiiiice after coat two, let me tell ya. By that stage of pregnancy, I had the third trimester insomnia and actually got up to paint the dark color on the walls at about 4 a.m. on a weekday because I was antsy to have my new favorite room of the house just done already. My version of nesting, I guess.

It was a win-win because I got to do something other than scroll Instagram in the middle of the night and I got to surprise Alex with the finished product in the morning which meant he wouldn’t need to do his least favorite job of painting.

We lived with the master bedroom plank accent wall for a couple of days and even though I loved it as much as I thought I would, the not-perfect edges were bothering us, so we ended up getting about 16 feet of trim we pre-painted and nailed up vertically along the edges of the wall.

That made a huge difference and we finally were done our last pre-baby house project!

This master bedroom plank accent wall definitely leveled up our bedroom, along with spackling the other three walls to make them look flat, and fixed our problem of having four doorways and a wall of windows in one small bedroom. It also paved the way for me to propose other big, bold projects throughout the house, so I’ll need to start my sneaky Pinteresting for the next one.

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