DIY Slat Door from Plywood _ Vertical Shiplap Paneling

Welcome to the channel. In this one I'm going to show you how I built this door for around $200. Let's get it. That's nice. So this is the second video in a series of videos I'm doing on a renovation of our master bedroom. On the first video I tackled our closets and I've got some other cool stuff planned so like and subscribe follow along. We used to have bifold doors here but they were just kind of cumbersome and in the way. The plan here is to make just one big door that slides over the whole thing and just blocks our closets that way. So about a year ago I made a video where I made a hidden door into our movie room and people really seemed to like it so I decided to put hidden doors in all of our rooms. No but seriously who doesn't love a hidden door? I mean I'm an 80s kid. I grew up on the Goonies in Indiana Jones so. The first plan of action was to remove this just god-awful paneling I'd put up in my early DIY beginnings. I basically just cut down some underlayment into eight inch strips and almost like a cheap shiplap but time for it to go. So Home Depot has this nickel gap vertical paneling and for the money man you really can't beat this stuff. It looks pretty good. So this is a little trick I use where I paint my outlets since I'm going to be painting that color anyway and it lets me know exactly where they're at. I decided not to glue it to the walls in case I ever decide to remove it. I'm using 18 gauge inch and a quarter brad nails. I just marked my studs ahead of time so I knew where they were at. The nice thing about this stuff is it sits on the baseboard. It's also pre-primed which is really nice. Make sure you wear a mask when you cut this stuff. It's super dusty. This stuff is really nice. You can't even see the seam. Guess where it is. I was able to reuse this corner trim that I had. It's just like a plastic corner bead. I wanted to make this an accent wall. So I decided to go with the 2021 Sherwin Williams color of the year. Urbane bronze. Have fun. Love you. So my initial thought was to use like a barn door to cover the space but then I started thinking man barn doors are becoming like the hawk to a girl of this design generation. So I wanted to try to come up with something a little more original. I hunted Pinterest and I found this sliding door. I was going to try and replicate it. So I went online I found some sliding barn door hardware and it's going to give it that kind of secret hidden door look that I was kind of going for. Not to mention slat walls are never going out of style. You know what I mean? The instructions were pretty terrible but the hardware itself was really good. It has this really nice soft closed mechanism and it works really well. The main bracket that holds most of the weight. I used this piece of three quarter inch plywood screwed into the studs to hold up the door. All right so for this project I'm just kind of figuring out as I go. Build a frame out of two by fours so it's nice and solid and then I'll put some yucca board on top to sandwich the two by fours with the yucca board. Paint the yucca board and then do my strips for the paneling. Half inch plywood strips. I'm gonna have to glue I think I'm gonna have to glue it all together so it doesn't fall apart but we'll see. So I really didn't have a plan for this thing. In my mind I thought I'd just create this kind of two by four frame. So ideally you'd probably want to use like three quarter inch plywood to build your door instead of the two by four framing. But because this door was like 52 inches wide I needed to create a bigger frame. Doing a piece of plywood would allow you to build this thing a lot thinner and maybe a lot lighter. I don't know. This was definitely the cheapest way to do it. This door cost me less than a hundred dollars in lumber. The kit comes with these nice stainless spring casters for the bottom. This is what supports the majority of the weight for your door. Oh it works! It works! The kit comes with this track that you attach to the bottom of the door and that's what keeps it from swaying left to right so you get a nice smooth roll back and forth. And just to be clear I'm not sponsored by these people. Love that soft close. All right now let's build some slats. Let's get slatty with it. I decided to go with half inch plywood just because it eliminates a lot of the weight. I'm gonna sand the whole thing, stain it, before I cut it down into slats. It'll just make everything a lot easier that way. The finish on this plywood was already pretty smooth but I just came back with some 220 to give it that baby bottom smooth. You know what I mean? I like to use this pre-stained conditioner. It helps reduce a lot of the splotchiness associated with these cheap stains on cheap wood. So these first cuts tend to wobble on me a little bit. I would recommend cutting the board in half before you start to rip down these little pieces. But I started getting the hang of it. The more I cut the straighter they became. So an area where I messed up if I could do this again I would really take my time and paint these sides and really get the paint on there thick because I had to go back and touch up a lot of the sides after I already mounted them. So I think what I'm gonna do here is start in the middle, work my way out. That way I have the same board on each side when I get to the ends. I laid a piece along the bottom so that my spacing would be exactly half inch off the floor for all my boards. Same thing with along the ceiling. It would make all the spacing along the ceiling exactly the same. For the actual gaps between the slats I just used a piece of plywood on edge to give me that half inch gap. I'm using these inch and a quarter brad nails. 18 gauge and you can't see them when they go in. So I initially thought about gluing these on but after putting four nails in them they were they were on there pretty tight so I didn't have to worry about that. But this is what I'm talking about having to go back and paint all the edging was a little bit of a pain in the butt. Cut it a little bit close. I had five to spare but man it turned out cool. I love it. So by building this thing out of plywood I saved myself about 200 to 250 dollars instead of using the pre-built panels. If you're doing a full wall of these going the plywood route would save you quite a bit of money. I went back afterward and added quarter round to the ceiling and to the floors. This is what the back side looks like. And of course a few little touches for the final reveal.