I Remodeled My Living Room by Covering it in Plywood

[Music] hi i'm chris and this is my terrible living room and let's make it not so terrible [Music] hey it's me again it's a few weeks later and my living room is a little bit less terrible now so let's go over how i did it so every renovation starts off the same way actually that's the second step it starts with needing a reason to renovate in the first place and hopefully a plan so here's ours so this is our living room slash dining room and i say slash because it's basically just one open space and we've been putting off doing anything with it for a really long time for a couple of reasons first is it's just really awkward and that's mainly because originally the house would have ended here but in the 70s whoever lived here decided to add a family room down here and that's really the main room that we hang out in but anyway when they did it they also extended the house about three feet in this section and about six feet over here couple that with a fireplace wall that's already at 45 degrees and the room just has a bunch of angles and nooks and honestly it's just kind of hard to use and speaking of that here's how we've been using it so the dining room area has been great we use it every night and it's fine the way that it is i've got a few pieces of furniture that i built in it and i'll link those videos below and there isn't really much to do in here other than painting and new baseboards so that it'll match the area where we are going to do a lot of work in the living room so in here again we're going to do paint and baseboards and we'll also get some furniture so that we actually start well living in it but the two really big things that we're gonna do are on these walls so you'll see me working on it in this video but it was honestly such a large and involved project i've got a complete other video that goes into more detail on these built-ins that we're gonna make for the awkward nook and then the other and probably biggest change is going to be getting rid of this ugly mantle and doing a really modern focal fireplace wall okay that's the game plan so let's get into it all right so before we rip out the mantle i wanted to make sure that i documented just how ugly this thing was sadly the nicest thing about it is probably the piece of plywood that i had to tape over the opening when our two-year-old decided to break the screen a few months ago in fact that was actually kind of the last straw in getting us to finally undertake this project and i guess in a way the plywood kind of served as inspiration for what we're about to do to the fireplace walls so in that respect thanks otto you're welcome [Music] now in taking the mantle out our priority was damaging the wall the least amount possible ultimately you're not going to see any of this wall but we still wanted a good base to build upon so we quickly realized that a hammer wasn't going to be a good tool for the job and instead used a multi-tool to break the presumably 67 year old seal and then the mantle came out really easily in one big piece [Music] and with that out of the way we got our first good look at what the brick looked like and it wasn't great but honestly it was about what i expected and it's definitely good enough to make it work so next i vacuumed out all of the ash that had been here for longer than we've lived here since between it not getting that cold here having forced heat and basically spending no time in this room anyway we've used it exactly zero times and then to give ourselves a good enough surface to paint we used some of this stuff to fill in all of the spots where mortar used to live [Music] finally the last things to do before we could actually start building and putting in some new stuff was prep for paint which included but was not limited to removing baseboards clearing out some furniture or trying to anyway removing this picture art wall thing i had done spackling nail holes cleaning the walls and sanding a couple spots and finally removing a bunch of nails oh and scrubbing the inside of the fireplace and since i love you guys so much i'm not gonna make you watch me paint okay so at this point everything has been painted except for the brick the inside's been painted with this high heat spray paint black stuff whatever the outside's gonna get painted white still you might notice in some of the shots that the wall still looks really messy and the reason that it looks like that i didn't bother fixing it up is because since we're going to be floating a plywood wall on top of it i'm going to basically ruin the wall so there'd be no point in fixing it i figure if i'm ever going to have it as a plain looking wall i'll do it at that point so it'll be the next people's problem all that said to keep things in order the actual next thing that we did was build and install the built-in cabinets and shelving and since it took me about 17 minutes and 43 seconds to explain how we did that and because i didn't want to elongate this video by 17 minutes and 43 seconds i made an entire other video that goes over that build in detail which i'll link in the description and here i'll just give an extremely abbreviated version of how it's made [Music] since the dawn of time people have longed for places to store their items and found refuge in cabinets they can be used to store all sorts of items things like books hats tools car keys floss three pens and two pencils chris a wallet rode microphone hand sanitizer okay with the built-ins installed we could turn our attention to the old ugly fireplace wall and i'm going to start by putting a few coats of paint over the brick so they'll still be pretty ugly but by the time i'm done it's a sort of hidden camouflage ugly rather than a in your face ugly then the next morning we started putting up the structure for the plywood wall so here we're figuring out exactly what was behind the wall and looking for solid material that we could anchor some four inch wide by half inch thick strips of plywood too and if it wasn't already obvious now you can see why we weren't too concerned about fixing up this wall prior to [Music] painting [Music] so in this shot you can see how we initially attached our strips but in a minute when we're actually installing you'll notice that this is gonna change a bit essentially we decided to remove the portion of these strips that extended beyond where the old mantel was and we also added back in a long strip along the top edge of the brick and extended the parts on the sides of the brick up another six inches or so so with that all ready to go the last thing that we had to do before we could put the panels up was actually make the panels so we did that in the shop by basically just cutting ourselves 10 panels that were all oversized at this point since we'll cut them to fit on site at the house so while i'm making those let me take a second to thank squarespace for sponsoring this video so i've been using squarespace for about four years now and it's been great prior to that i used to code everything on my own which is fine if you like doing that but it's hard takes time and honestly the outcome wasn't as nice as the templates that i use now with squarespace and the worst part is it was taking me away from doing the things that i really should be focusing on like fixing ugly fireplaces now in addition to squarespace making it super easy to build and maintain your site by domains and all that stuff they also have plenty of e-commerce which has been really helpful since we started selling plans things like inventory management a simple and secure checkout process and unlimited products allows us to easily manage online transactions so if you're thinking about starting a website or even if you already have one that you think could be better you up to yourself to check out squarespace to see if it might be a better option for you just head over to squarespace.com4i's for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use the offer code 4is to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or a domain all right thanks squarespace okay so we're back at the house and ready to finally make this wall look decent and i could just show a few shots of us screwing panels to the wall but it was definitely a lot more involved than that so i'm going to go over the game plan what we did and then at the end of the video give my takeaways on this project for what i might do differently next time so as you recall we've got some messed up looking brick here in this shot you can see that these four bricks are like a quarter of an inch proud of the others and this was pretty much true for all three sides of the opening so basically just butting a plywood edge up to the brick wasn't gonna work and ultimately we're gonna need a straight line but since we don't have one we're going to have to make one not actually but just visually and the way that we're going to do that is by cutting a bevel on the edge of every piece of plywood that meets the brick so essentially once it's installed it'll just ever so slightly overlap the edge of the brick giving us that clean visual line in addition to that we're also going to cut a bevel along each edge that meets the wall on either side and the reason for that is since the walls are at an angle it'll let us get a tighter fit okay so here we're striking a line level and we'll use this to position the top edge of the panel that will go above the brick and that's going to give us the reveal that we're looking for along the bottom edge and to attach them we're going to use some finish screws those come with a really small head so that way they just aren't as noticeable but since you'll still be able to see little dots wherever they're placed we're also going to mark out and space each screw so that we get a really consistent clean line going up the wall so with the first panel up we could attach the second and you can just barely see it in this shot but we're using stacks of seven cards to give us roughly a sixteenth of an inch gap between the panels now since when we made these in the shop we initially left them a little bit too large to fit the last one we had to take a measurement and then use a track saw to rip it down to the finished width and the reason we're using a track saw instead of a table saw is because we're actually cutting at a really slight taper since the ceiling was at a slight angle that way it would fit in and have a clean line up top [Music] now as luck would have it even after cutting the taper to match the ceiling when fitting it in we noticed that the ceiling is actually a really wobbly line so we scribed the wobbly line to match and then with some aggressive sanding tried to create the illusion of a somewhat straight transition and you can see in the shot that we didn't really do a great job but it's better than nothing at all and if i'm being honest if you had told me that this is the portion of the install that i would be least satisfied when we were done with it i'd take that deal okay at this point the next thing we're gonna do is feed a cable for a tv through the wall and as you can see here we actually ended up having to take our first panel off to do this now this isn't a sponsorship but i bought a frame tv for this part of the house and the reason i chose that isn't because it's the best tv i'm sure there are a bunch of tvs with better specs out there for even cheaper but i picked it because it looks really clean on a wall thanks to the way that it flush mounts and because you can hook up all of the components and power it with a single semi-translucent cord that feeds into a box which will tuck away in the built-ins and honestly i don't really envision us watching that much tv in here so really it was more important to me to have something that looked good as an object more so than looks and sounds good as a tv anyhow with the first panel back on the wall next we moved over to the other side and continued working our way up the wall and this was basically just a mere version of what we did on the other side with the only major difference being on this center panel where we sanded off a little notch that we used to feed our tv cable through all right so with our six upper panels on next we could hang the tv so i aimed for higher than what i would aim for with a normal tv and instead opted for closer to an eye height that you'd want for wall mounted artwork since that's mostly what the tv is going to be used for and actually i'll show you more on that in a minute but anyhow with the bracket mounted we could hang the tv and then install the four lower panels is there anything that shows in the [Applause] instructions i'll take the plastic off it later okay so now let's see if this is good shin wise right so that kind of brings us to where we are right now while i'm recording this voiceover so i'm gonna stop talking for a minute and let future chris and sean take care of some of the finishing details and then we'll meet back up to talk about the furniture how we're gonna use this room going forward show off some beauty shots and maybe most importantly for anybody interested in actually doing something like this give my single biggest takeaway for what i could have done to simplify this project all right chris and sean so this needs to be that way okay [Music] so we're gonna have to cut this this way feels like we left just not enough but we can get it from another piece yeah that's gonna i mean you can't get a close fit now because of that stupid bevel so then we'd have to bevel this i mean i guess that's the problem is we're trying to fit molding into a spot where there's already molding that's 50 years old but i don't want to redo this morning because i'm going to redo this molding whenever you do the kitchen i'm going to go get a smog check after smog it up don't hurt below 44 and a quarter and we got to pull this nail out that i missed [Music] [Applause] let's see weird sounding but i'll take it okay all right so we kind of worked our way around to the fireplace wall we cut a bevel on this little piece of hardwood that we cut that'll be molding for the bottom side we're going to do the same thing on the top and we're going to do a mirror version of this on the other side which will cut a little groove in for the cable but for now we're just going to mark how long to cut this which it looks like about right that one how does it fit nicely so it turns out we had to cut the notch a little bigger than we thought because i wasn't expecting or wasn't considering how far this comes out and where the i guess coaxial cable comes through the floors kind of close to the wall so we ended up having to cut one big notch not the best but i mean there's already two holes in the ground here so it's still better than it was let's send her home you can see a huge gap i mean no but then i won't be able to really see you um actually here so i'll just talk and then all right so we cut ourselves some extra strips of plywood that we're going to use to kind of cover the gaps where we put the built-ins there's basically a huge gap because this wall is really bowed and not perfectly vertical so at the bottom there's like a 3 8 or a quarter inch of a gap and there's a little over a half of an inch at the top we're gonna cut this one so that it's flush at the bottom and comes to the top about a half of an inch over to cover this other piece of molding that we'll have to get for the other bad part of the wall [Music] all right that was fun so in the timeline that you're watching this now the room should basically be done all the moldings are in the touch-up work is done yada yada yada that said it's going to be impossible for me to completely finish this room for the video for one big reason and that is as a furniture maker i really want to build a bunch of different pieces of furniture to complete this room so it's probably going to be like a year-long process that said i love 3d modeling and drawing so i'm not going to leave you hanging so the main sort of furniture grouping within this room is going to be the couch coffee table side chair area so we bought this couch a couple weeks ago in preparation for the remodel and for a coffee table i really wanted to use something on the smaller side so i'm using the california table that i built a couple years back and for side chairs i have two eems lcw chairs that my aunt and uncle were gracious enough to give us about 10 years ago that said i only think that we're gonna be able to use one of them just space-wise anyway then underneath it all we got this rug that's got some really nice pops of color and a sort of modern vibe to pull everything together so those are the pieces that we're gonna use but what i'm still not set on is where to use them the most obvious way is to just push it all against the wall and maybe that's the best i don't know but for whatever reason i kind of have an aversion to it so another option is to essentially rotate everything 90 degrees this way and then i think it might be cool to build a big low l-shaped bookcase to go behind the couch and along the wall so what we're probably going to do is try the furniture in this way and then live with it for a minute and just see if it works and then depending on that we'll take it from there all right so now if we turn our attention over this way i'll be honest i'm really not sure what i'm gonna do here obviously we'll get some rocks and logs and all that stuff for inside the fireplace for looks only but on the wall itself i think i might just keep it this plane i've told you with the idea of doing some kind of little plywood bump out mantle thing but i kind of like the way it looks like this so maybe just keep it as simple as a few plants flanking the wall just to bring in something more organic looking and leave it like that i guess the long story short is it's gonna be a process and i'll just try to live with things and see how it evolves over time okay so i know this plywood wall look isn't for everybody but if it is something that you think you never try or i guess what i wish i could go back in time to tell myself would be this spend a little bit more time on the substructure of the wall and you'll save yourself a ton of time when you're actually installing the panels basically if i had it to do over again i wish that i would have put a strip of plywood on the wall at every spot where a seam meets horizontal and vertical and the reason for that is keeping the panels co-planar at the seams now thankfully we were able to get a pretty clean install but we ended up having to shim things pretty frequently to get a good fit in terms of the depth of the panels but if you had a piece of plywood at the seams you just screw your panels down tight at the seams and that would keep everything coplanar so the good news is it's not really anything that's harder to do from a technical point of view it's just sort of a different approach that i think would have really helped us out with the install but you know i'm new to all this this is literally the first remodel that i've ever taken on myself so i feel confident that i can get better and i hope to do more okay two other things to mention first earlier i talked about the tv and how i decided to hang it wall art height well that's what i want its primary use to be the tv actually has this entire art mode built in for this purpose so i think it'll be a great place to display family photos artwork and all that kind of stuff i've even started looking into it and from what i can tell i think i might have to come up with a workaround but my dream would be to have it display animated art so for example say i do a drawing of one of my pieces i think it would be really cool if it went through a 10 second animation on the creation every three minutes or so and then after 15 minutes maybe it cycles on to a new picture i don't know i'll figure it out but anyway finally i want to give a huge thank you to my entire family for putting up with me through all this and my wife in particular so you may not realize it but this room has actually been in more of my videos than any other room including my garage and my workshop and the reason is for several years this room functioned as my photo wall for my thumbnails and eventually as a kind of holding spot for things that were coming and going and long story short i promised my wife a long time ago probably too long that i would turn this room into a proper living room that we could use and enjoy as a family and look at my shoes baby steps alright so while we take a look at some finished beauty shots let me also thank all of my patreon members for helping me to make these videos possible seriously i say it time and time again but you really do make all this possible for me so i'll keep saying it and it'll never be enough but thank you seriously and if you like the show and want to find out more about how you can support it and pick up some goodies check out the patreon link in the description and as always no pressure all right thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 215,986

Keywords: DIY, Modern, Modern Living Room, Living Room Remodel, Living Room Renovation, DIY renovation, renovation, remodel, DIY remodel, Living Room, How to build a home, How to remodel a living room, fireplace wall, focal fireplace wall, plywood wall, DIY plywood wall, Built-in Cabinets, DIY Built-Ins, fixing up a fireplace, paint a fireplace, samsung frame tv, tv above fireplace, makeover, make over, living room makeover, living room make over

Id: Thekqk_BDSk

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021