Now that the adventure of the rural hotel is coming to an end, I have to move my workshop to another garage in another house. After the some cleaning I did a coat of white paint on the concrete floor followed by another one in which I used some blue dye. I’m not sure if it’s the most suitable paint, so maybe I’ll also apply some anti-slip paint or maybe I’ll buy some anti-fatigue carpet, I’ll see. At the moment I had another job that needed to be done as soon as possible, and that is that one of the walls of the workshop gets moisture coming from the other side and it was not going to look very good in my woodworking videos if I left that wall as it was. Removing the moisture is not feasible for me tight now, so I decided to cover the wall with some easy to install paneling. That’s why I’m going to put tongue and groove wood paneling.
También puedes ver en este blog mi guía para fresar machihembrado con la fresadora.
Some of you may think that leaving the wall with the color of the wood will be perfect for a woodworking channel, but I wanted to give it a touch of color, or rather colors. I hope I didn’t overdo it and that it doesn’t hurt your eyes to see so many colors (those of you who follow my woodworking channel with videos in Spanish already know that in the end I decided to paint the tongue and groove paneling white).
The humidity that gets into the wall is not much, but enough to make it not worth painting, so I thought the best option would be to cover it with a plastic film below tongue and groove paneling. In the garage where I had the workshop, that you have seen so far in my videos, I also had moisture on the wall (much more, sometimes even a small layer of water) and on that occasion I covered it with plastic film and chipboard panels on treated wood slats. And although the chipboard was deformed due to changes in temperature and humidity (and I do not mean that it has swollen by absorbing water) I think it held quite well. As the humidity is much lower on this wall of this other garage, I’m sure that covering it will be a good and cheap option.
The wood paneling I bought is the cheapest I could find, with broken knots and some areas where resin oozes, although luckily it only oozes a little resin in a couple of places on the front face of the boards. I certainly would not use this tongue and groove for the interior of the house.
To paint it I rummaged through all the old paint cans I had, including the ones for painting metal, and found a pack of cotton waste threads that I had bought some time ago. Although I had to buy a can of red paint and another of yellow paint (mixing them I also got the orange). Making a tight ball of cotton waste, dipping it in the paint and then rubbing it on the tongue and groove boards I painted them little by little. This way, instead of having painted wood, we get a stained wood effect, with all the grain perfectly visible. Once I had them painted I cut them all in the middle. And I also cut in the middle some of those halves.
Well, actually after a while I painted this wall wainscoting white. And I also made one small wooden wall with slats and particle board.
In order to put the wood wainscoting on the wall, first I need to install some vertical battens. The ones I used are treated wood strips, and were also the cheapest ones I could find.
I drilled a hole in the middle and another one about 15cm from each end, put a steel nail in each hole, placed the battens in the desired position (in my case at 60cm from each other) taking care to have it vertically level and drove the nails about half a centimeter. I removed the nails and the batten and drilled 8mm diameter holes in the marks left by the nails. Then I inserted some nylon plugs and screwed the battens to the wall. And so, little by little, until all the battens are all installed in place.
Although now I recommend using wider battens than the ones I used. Or put two battens together one next to the other. This will make it easier for the end grain join between two consecutive tongue and groove boards to match well on the vertical battens. And we will have no problems when it comes to nailing the ends of the boards to the battens.
On top of the battens I placed two layers of greenhouse plastic film to protect the paneling from the moisture coming from the wall. In the other workshop I had placed the plastic film directly against the wall, but I think that putting it on the battens, and so separating it from the wall, will help the moisture to vent. Since the battens are in direct contact with the wet wall, I needed the battens to be made of treated wood.
All that was left was to nail the wooden tongue and groove boards of this paneling to the battens. For that I used headless nails. The most complicated part is nailing the bottom row, but if we install it with the help of a level at the same time as the next row, as shown in the video, we will be able to leave it well leveled. The rest of the rows are very easy to lay and I just had to be careful not to match two boards of the same color. From the second row on, I only use one nail in the middle on the top of the boards (okay, this is not the correct way to do this if we install paneling in a room inside the house).
There are some techniques to hide the nails, and also clips to install tongue and groove that end up hidden behind the boards, but I did not need so much for the workshop. Normally I would drive the nail heads into the wood with the help of a nail punch, but I leave the nail heads protruding slightly as I want to be able to remove them if necessary in the event that humidity and temperature changes affect these planks too much.
