Our House—The Walls

Many new homes have drywall.  Putting up the sheets of drywall goes pretty fast but taping and mudding the joints, sanding them down and doing a second and maybe a third application of mud takes a lot of time.  And, it takes some experience to get the joints done so there is no indication of a joint after the walls are painted.  We just didn’t want to go through all of that on any more walls than necessary.  We did put up drywall on two walls in the kitchen and in the bathrooms.

The above picture, taken during our construction, shows the two walls in the kitchen that were drywalled and painted. 

We decided to put up pre-finished paneling on the rest of the walls.  Installation isn’t much more difficult than putting up drywall but there was no further finishing necessary.  However, we did incur a bit of a problem with some of the paneling.  What we felt we could afford is not real wood but a synthetic material and is quite thin.  Most likely due to the humidity we have here some of the sheets tended to warp.  Perhaps had we put up drywall and used a panel adhesive this would not have happened but that would have nearly doubled the cost.

By the time we were ready to do the walls in the addition we had come up with another idea.  We discovered that Lowes carried a product made by ABTCO called Knotty Barnboard, a textured panel siding that came in 4’ X 8’ sheets and was 1/2” thick.  It is manufactured for exterior use so we were sure that there would be no warping.  It did require painting but no taping and mudding as with drywall.  And, if we decide we want a different color we can paint it with the new color.

Above is a close-up of a section of the barnboard.  The color isn’t quite true.  We painted it Antique White but at least you can see the texture.  On some of the areas you can see “saw” marks as if the board had been cut on a circular saw mill.  We wish we had known about this product earlier as we would have used it throughout the house. We were told by some of the folks at Lowes that many people are using it in their homes.  We toured some log homes a couple of years ago and found that the folks in one had paneled all of the rooms in their basement with this product.

This view is of a section of wall in our living room.  If you click on the picture you can get a larger view and can see the individual “boards” in the panels.