Faux Beam Cased Openings

Tell all ya friends and neighbors!

Hopefully you can tell from the title that we got ourselves some fake wood beams coming your way. Other working titles included, but were not limited to, “We Got Wood”, “How To Get Wood (Beams)”, “Getting Wood”, and any other middle school jokes you can think of re: faux wood.  Before I get hate mail from all (both) of you that read this blog, I promise we love Jesus. We just also know that Jesus gave us a sense of humor and who are we to keep that to ourselves?

So, here’s where we started in this room:

This photo is like if you were standing on the fireplace looking toward our entry way. Remember that super sweet fireplace we just made over? Oh you don’t? Lucky for you, I’m tech savvy enough to link to parts one AND two. I’m v kind. (Update 11/18: Apparently I’m not tech savvy enough to not make a hard drive crash with all the photos to these posts so they currently don’t exist *cue tears*)

Let’s talk about a something I see in this pic above which is from the realtor. DOORS. There are double doors in this room. Not only does it already feel closed off to the entry because there’s that wall, but just in case you really don’t want people to see that you’re home, JUST CLOSE THOSE DOUBLE DOORS. That’ll show ’em. Well, we ripped those off. To the left of the picture that you cant see is actually another wall and a doorway that leads to our kitchen THAT USED TO ALSO HAVE A DOOR ON IT. ‘Twas just a big ol’ box o’ seclusion.

The 5 or 10 year plan here is to get rid of those walls entirely. Honestly, we could have gone ahead and knocked out that double door wall because it’s not load bearing, but the problem comes in when you’re talking about flooring.

We want to do all new floors in the house because … You ready for this? There are ELEVEN different types of flooring in this house. Did you hear (read?) me? ELEVEN, you guys. FOUR DIFFERENT types of hardwood, two types of carpet, linoleum in the kitchen/laundry, different linoleum in each of the three bathrooms, and some weird tile stuff in the upstairs walkway between the office and the upstairs guest room. While we don’t necessarily care about redoing floors upstairs any time soon, downstairs we definitely want new floors throughout, but we couldn’t agree on what kind of floors to do (shocker) so we did none, kept the walls, and decided to just go ahead and do these cased openings.

Also, not only do we have eleven different flooring types, but we have THREE different levels of floors. Our entry and den is one level, then there’s like an inch difference stepping in to the kitchen. We found out why when we peeled up the floor a bit in the kitchen and saw that there are three levels of linoleum there. WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE? Then you step back down about a half an inch to go back into our hallway where all our bedrooms live. Needless to say, if you get the chance to visit, you probably will leave feeling like you have vertigo. We are sorry.

I digress. We’re here to talk about wood. HA. You guys just want the wood. Maybe that’s my last joke. Prolly not, though.

Strolling through the aisles of our vacation home (read: Lowes), Jordan found this stuff: Say whaaaaat?? It’s hard to tell from these super professional photos, but this is a little less than half inch thick faux wood paneling. It looks super real. Since J wanted reclaimed wood and couldn’t get his hands on any that was reasonably priced, he was pretty stoked when he found this. Plus, it was $20 a SHEET! Even has the circles like a real tree! The goal was to find a solid wood beam for our mantle, but after I whined so long about not having a mantle, J finally agreed to just find something to make me one. But after he found this, he also thought it would be perfect for doing door casings. He was right! (Don’t tell him I said that.)

Our first step was to just rip it down into pieces with a saw just on the lines that were already “marked” or whatever you want to call it.Once we were able to get it ripped, we were able to start measuring. Now, here’s where things get blurry because when it comes to anything math related, it’s all J. I was really good at math in school, but since I got outta college, I’ve tried to fill my mind with more fun things and that math part has just fallen out. So, he measured every piece of this and they fit together like a glove. The only thing I can tell you is they are 6 inches wide. As far as height and all that, it’s going to depend on your particular opening.

We ran into a bit of a snag when we realized that our baseboards were going to be thicker than this wood. Ruh roh. Luckily, I had let Jordan win an argument and do shiplap on the two walls next to our fireplace and one wall in our kitchen because he promised me he could do it for cheap. He actually used underlayment that we got at Home Depot. That wood was literally the exact depth we needed to make the wood stuff line up. HOLLA! SOMEBODY TELL ‘EM HOW GOOD HE IS! 

After he cased every opening with this underlayment stuff, he then went to cutting down the boards to size. Remember I told you how they all fit together like a glove? They do! See? Angles and all! He’s a genius.

We used wood glue and that Ryobi nail gun that runs on a battery which is cool except it only works like every 4 or 5 nails. FIRST WORLD PROBZ but it is SO annoying.

Our other snag we ran in to was we had to somehow get light switches in these things. We didn’t want to cut around them because that’d look super weird. We ended up buying a light switch extender box thingie that allowed the cover to be placed on top of the wood. Ta da!

I gotta say I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out! Check it out for yourself.

Per usual, I like to provide cost breakdowns so you can budget accordingly if you’re interested in doing this!

Cost + Supplies: (Some affiliate links provided. Read my full disclosure here.)

• Ruler
• Wood glue
• Skillsaw (Ours was borrowed. Perks of having a husband who lives back in his hometown and knows LIT’RLLY everybody) but for pricing, this is what we are borrowing
• Faux wood paneling – We got 2 of these from Lowes. For reference, we have eight foot ceilings, the casings were six feet wide on all sides, and we had three openings to do. $19.68 x 2 + tax.
• Underlayment – You may not need this depending on where you use this. Also, we already had this, so this was free for us, but a huge sheet of it at Home Depot is only $13.98.
• Nail gun – We use this Ryobi one, but ours definitely costs us extra (meaning, our already depleted sanity).
• Math brain – Looking like Wofford tuition is sitting pretty around $40,000+ a year but MAY B U CAN BEG 4 SKAWLERSHIPZ

Cost for us:

Less than $39.36 + tax! (+ student loans we already paid off)

Minimum Total Investment:

Roughly $40 + tax, depending on what supplies you have on hand! We’d advise you to borrow a nail gun and saw for this if you don’t have one. Barter. Beg. Do what you gotta do, but you don’t need one if this is your only project you’ll ever do.

Would we do this again?

Yeah! It was pretty easy, all things considered!

 

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