Try this hack to get a panelled wall for £29

Virgin Radio

7 Mar 2022, 16:16

We all love a bargain, but home renovations can often be expensive.

One couple has shared the trick they used to create a wood-panelled wall for a fraction of the price they were originally quoted.

The couple, Matthew Scoby and Grace Shannon, wanted to change their home after scrolling through idea boards online.

They had a few quotes from builders for £150, but they used a hack to do the job themselves for just £29! 

To achieve the panelled look, they added frames to their wall.

They explained they "couldn't be any more happy" with the end result.

To do the job, it needed 25 metres of picture frame panelling (£25) and two tubes of No More Nails glue (£4).

After adding the frames, the couple used filler where needed.

Next, they painted the frames the same colour as the wall to blend them in.

Matthew told DIY On A Budget UK: "This panelling was something we found on Pinterest and we thought it would be perfect to bring character to the room.

"After doing some research we found that the simplest way to measure it out was to work out how large we wanted our gaps to be between each frame first and then decide how many frames we want. So for this wall we went with 15cm gaps and we wanted four frames.  

"With four frames we were left with three gaps in the middle and one on either side. So to work out how wide we needed to cut the frames we had to multiply the size of the gap, 15cm, by the number of gaps, five, and then take that number off the width of the full wall which was 304cm."

"Then all we needed to do was divide what we were left with by four and that gave us the width of each frame to cut, which turned out to be 57.25cm each. And then we followed the same process for the height of the frames, taking into account the coving and skirting board which hasn't yet been fitted."

Matthew admitted that figuring out the maths "was definitely the hard part", but once they got their numbers in order, all they had to do was make their cuts and stick the frames to the wall.

"Once we had cut all the pieces I called for my dad to come around to give us a hand holding the panels whilst we fixed them on. He came up with the genius idea of cutting a piece of wood exactly as wide as the gaps we wanted and then we could use this piece of wood to both mark frames on the wall first and to also check the gaps are correct as we are fitting it."

Matthew said: "This was something which we first believed only a highly skilled tradesman could accomplish and we were told it would cost around £150 a wall to get someone in to do. 

"So after looking at the finished product we couldn't be any more happy that we made the decision to try it ourselves. 

"We are now planning on doing the same in the hallway and up the stairs after seeing how easy it was!”