How to faux panel.

Do you like how I just tried to make “faux panel” a verb in the title of this post?  How to walk?  How to jump?  No.  How to faux panel, people.  I considered “How to get your faux panel on,” but I don’t think I’m cool enough for that.

Anyway, I’m dragging the hallway progress reports on longer than anyone would like.  After your stellar feedback on my shelves, I did what anyone would do…I got lost in indecision and distracted myself with another project.  But, I have good news.  That project was the faux paneling below the shelves.   It may not be painted, but it is up.  And this means I can show you how I did it.

Now, remember, I’m not great with math.  This means I went back to the graph paper to make sure I really had things planned out.  I recommend you do the same.  I measured twice and drew my plans.  Here they are:

Don’t bother trying to read it too closely, otherwise you’ll notice a blatant typo in my numbers.

(Can you use the word typo when referring to something that isn’t typed?).

The picture really just helps me point out a few things I thought about, which you should think about, too,  if you want to attempt a project like this:

• Figure out the length of space you have to work with, how many rectangles you want, and do some basic math to figure out where they will be placed horizontally on the wall (if I can do it, so can you).
• Make sure your plans won’t hit any outlets or light switches, taking into account the width of your molding. (I had to make sure my outlet was at least 2″ away from my line to account for the thickness.)
• Figure out the two points between which the rectangles will be centered vertically.  This got a little confusing for me because of the dreaded baseboard heater (the stupid thing is bound and determined to screw me up, I swear).  While it may have looked more pleasing to the eye to have the squares centered between the heater and the bottom of the chair rail, I knew that it wouldn’t look quite right when we get around to putting faux paneling on other walls in the area that don’t have baseboard heaters.  (Like the wall pictured below.)  So, I centered my rectangles between the height of my regular baseboard (4″) and the bottom of the chair rail (36″), leaving me 32″ to work with.

(I just noticed that you can see our baby bouncer AND swing in the above picture.  Plus a dog bone in the middle of the living room.  Such is life around here.)

My three rectangles worked out to be 22″ high and 24″ wide (when measuring from the outside edge of the molding).  They were four inches apart from each other.

Which leads me to how you get these rectangles.

First, use a level and measuring tape and mark off the rectangles on your wall.  Knowing I would be painting anyway, I just drew my lines on with pencil.

Then I picked up some MDF molding at Home Depot (it’s nice and lightweight, and already primed white).  I figured that one 8-foot piece for each rectangle would be enough.  But naturally I made one bad cut and needed to get another piece.  So, save yourself the gas money and pick up an extra piece just in case.  Each piece was only about $3.

I’m not fancy enough to have a compound mitre saw to make pretty angled cuts, but I do have an old-fashioned mitre box (which was less than $15, if I do recall).  This box with the back saw (it comes as a package) helps you make near-perfect angles.

To make a square, you will need four pieces that have edges angling inward on both sides.  Once you have one side of the piece cut, measure your desired length from the very top point of your angle to the very top point of the next angle.  Mark it and make your next cut.  See how this time my angle is going the opposite way so that it is angling inward?

Here is an example of one of my finished cuts.  Smooth like butter, no?  What you don’t see are the drips of sweat coming from me sawing like a madwoman next to the heater.  The.dreaded.baseboard.heater.

Next, attach the molding to the wall.  If you are using wood, you should definitely use some small finish nails, but using some glue material first will help you get everything lined up very nicely.  I skipped nails altogether and opted to use a tube of Liquid Nails made for molding.

Don’t worry if there is a little bit of space in your corners where your cuts come together; we’ll fix that later.

Once your pieces are on and secure, you might need to sand the corners a little bit to get rid of any roughness.

Then use some paintable caulk to fill in any gaps.  Here is one of my corners before caulking:

Here I am filling it in (don’t worry, a wet rag wipes off the excess perfectly):

And the finished product:

And now it is ready for painting; aren’t you excited!?

Oh, and this mini tutorial skipped the part about how I cut a piece of chair rail to length and glued that to the wall, too.  But I did that, and it was easy.  Just dub me the MDF cutting and pasting queen.  I’ll take my tiara when I show you the finished product, okay?