How to Spackle Over Paneling in One Weekend

Before we get into to how to spackle over paneling, we have to tell you about the way we started making over our master bedroom, which is actually pretty embarrassing. It was earlier this year, I was about eight months pregnant and we had just finished covering the too-bold-for-us teal walls in our guest bedroom with a more neutral grey.

The difference was wild and, naturally, we spent a couple nights sleeping in there to get the full experience our friends and family will get when they visit. Then we got jealous of our own guest bedroom. Our master bedroom is smaller than the guest room but when we moved in we created a doorway to the main, big bathroom to make it like a master suite, plus it has a bigger closet, so it makes more sense as the main bedroom in the house. 

The problem was, once the bathroom door was there, that room had a door to the mudroom on one wall, a door to the closet and hallway on another wall, the bathroom door on the third wall and windows on the fourth which made it hard to comfortably fit the game-changer king-sized bed we’d just bought.

We had talked about eventually removing the mudroom door completely but got a few quotes from contractors for $1500-plus and decided that would be a DIY for after the baby because it would be ridiculous to start a project at 35 weeks, right? Wrong.

One morning as we woke up because the sunlight beamed down on our faces through the window we were forced to put our bed up against, I suggested maybe we could just see how easy the trim on the door to the mudroom would come out.

Alex was into the closet of tools immediately.

It should be noted that Alex is 100 percent my hype man which is simultaneously one of my favorite things about him and one of the most destructive things in our relationship. If I suggest a midnight drive to Whataburger for a milkshake, he’s in. If I say we should do a babymoon in Key West, he’s starting the Excel spreadsheet to rate the best Key Lime Pie (this really happened – hat tip to the tied-first-place Mrs. Mac’s Kitchen and Kermit’s.)

So, back to the trim. It came off surprisingly easy!

We’d already decided that the wall was going to become an accent plank wall which would be both beautiful and would mean we could cover the doorway and not need to match and patch in a piece of the wall paneling. But then there were the other three wood-paneled walls to deal with.

How to Start Spackling

We had a hard time finding solutions for the wall paneling we wanted gone. We didn’t want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to have someone drywall so we’d thought about just trying to fill in the grooves somehow.

There were a few Pinterest photos we’d found of others who had tried it but they had that shallow, evenly-spaced, 70s wood kind of paneling not our deep uneven groove paneling, so we figured we may as well give it a go and live with the unsightly aftermath if it went wrong until we could afford the drywall.

Luckily it worked out really well, so here’s a rundown of how to spackle over paneling.

Spackling Tools and Materials:

• Household cleaner and a rag
• Spackling
• Putty knife
• Plastic trays (What we used to dump the spackle on so we wouldn’t need to keep the tub open while we worked and have it dry out)
• A sander (we could NOT imagine doing the last steps by hand with sandpaper, so an electric sander is a must)
• Drop cloths
• Ventilator Masks 
• Paint  (we used Behr Matte Interior Paint and Primer in One in Simply White)

How to Spackle Over Paneling

Prep work is so important in this project because of how much dust there is when you start sanding the spackling down. It would’ve been so much easier to remove all the furniture in the room, but it wasn’t really possible for us because of, ya know, the bowling ball I was carrying around by then.

Start by giving the whole wall a thorough cleaning, especially in the grooves. It’s boring, definitely, but will make a difference in how the spackling will hold. 

We found that by the time we got done cleaning all the walls, the first area we did was dry enough to start working on it.

The spackling job itself isn’t hard, it’s just tedious and time consuming. Because I was at the my-feet-are-swollen-and-everything-hurts stage of pregnancy, I just started at head height and did the whole wall across, then sat down to do the bottom half so I could scoot across horizontally and not get up and down. It was hella glamorous. Alex then did the parts I couldn’t reach up top and it didn’t seem to make any difference doing the grooves in stages rather than finishing each one top-to-bottom at the same time.

Smooth It Like a Cake

It took a while to get into the groove – literally – of applying the paste. We found it easiest to put a big blob onto a paper plate and use the putty knife to kind of cut off little pieces. 

To actually apply it, you’re going to want to hold the putty knife at a 45-degree angle and swipe diagonally one way, then diagonally the other way over a small section of the groove. That way you’re making sure to get it all filled – air bubbles and chunks missing are a bitch to fix, it turns out.

Then, when the whole section or row you’re working on is done, hold the putty knife at the top and steadily move down the entire area, holding it straight to remove any excess. You’ve got to make sure you’re holding it straight otherwise if it’s at an angle or to the side it can dig into the spackling that isn’t dry yet and cause dents or divots.

The big hunks of spackling paste on the paper plate reminded me of strawberry frosting, probably because I was eating 7,000 calories a day, so I thought of it like icing a cake and making sure it’s smooth, which weirdly helps. You do what you’ve gotta do.

The whole process took a couple nights worth of work, then another day to make sure it was really dry, but could probably be knocked out in a weekend if you’ve got a whole day or some help. It’s pretty mindless work so we listened to a few podcasts – Andrea Savage is our new favorite after watching I’m Sorry and her podcast had just the amount of snark we needed to get through it.

Controlling the Dust

I can’t overstate how dusty it was. The spackling paste we used goes on pink and dries white, which was really handy in being able to tell when it’s ready to sand. Once we were completely done all the walls, we gave it another night to dry just to make sure when we started sanding we wouldn’t peel away any of it and want to go play in the street.

This next step is crucial – COVER EVERYTHING. Cover your furniture, cover your doorways, preferably open up a window.

Our circa 1940s house has entirely painted-shut windows meaning we couldn’t ventilate very well, so we kept the interior doors open. Such a big mistake. Like, cutting your own bangs during Coronavirus quarantine big.

In hindsight, we really should’ve shoved old towels under the doorways while we sanded because I ended up needing to rewash everything that was in our closet when the endless dust got up underneath the door crack. It was wild. 

It’s a lot of prep but so worth it, because once you start sanding, those beautiful flat walls start to come out and it’s so satisfying. 

For sanding, we literally just put on our masks (another very important step!) and got going. The most important thing when sanding it all down is make sure the sander stays super flat against the wall and you don’t turn it on its side or it could start digging down into the hardened spackling and make a dent, obviously undoing your many hours and podcasts-worth of time.

Check the Wall Smoothness

Once we thought we were done sanding everything we wiped down the walls again and stood back. So perfect, we are home improvement geniuses, we thought. But then I ran my hand over the wall and realized that some sections were still raised even though they looked flat to our eyes. Some other sections were still not full enough.

We literally stood there with our eyes shut running our hands over the walls to feel which areas needed work. So back we went, sanding some areas and filling in others and waiting for them to dry again. This part took probably another half-day to get right.

This time we really could stand back, dust on our clothes, in our hair and in our souls, and enjoy our handiwork. Obviously since the wall was originally grey and the spackling dried white, our walls looked crazy and striped, but I painted a test patch of white paint over what was once a groove to test it had worked and I honestly surprised myself with how good it looked.

Our walls needed two coats of paint to hide the stripes, but yours may be different if you’re using a good coverage paint and are going a darker color. We didn’t use primer, but that’s probably another good option to help cover those stripes before painting. Other than that it was the same as painting any other wall.

Now that you’ve learned how to spackle over paneling, check out those before and after photos though. *chef kiss*

The next part – the cleanup – was a lot less fulfilling, but at the least we were ready for the next step in our grand bedroom plan. The accent plank wall was probably the most impactful DIY we’ve done yet!

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