Happy Thursday! Today’s post is about various types of trim – on the walls or ceilings! Adding visual interest to your home with trim is a huge trend these days.
Most of us know about shiplap thanks to Joanna Gaines and Fixer Upper, but there are lots of other ways to use trim to add interest to your walls and ceilings. And these trim options can fit with many different styles – traditional, coastal, farmhouse, rustic.
When we built our house, we chose several different types of trim – mostly based on inspiration pictures I had! (I actually have plants to add a board and batten wall to my office as well – read about it here!) However, I will say that more intricate types of trim don’t come cheap. If you can DIY these, more power to you! We did do some prioritizing on which trim options were most important to us, and I had to say no to a few things I really wanted to do, because we didn’t want to break the budget.
Without further ado, let’s talk about the different types we have in our house!
Shiplap // You are probably most familiar with this one! We added shiplap to our fireplace surround, butler’s pantry, and one of our powder room walls. Shiplap comes in a variety of sizes, you can vary the gap in between each piece, and you can leave it natural, stain it, or paint it. We have painted 6″ pine shiplap with a v-groove in each place (and it’s all painted white to match our trim). We chose to do shiplap in just a few places because I didn’t want to overdo it. Our house is a combination of styles and I didn’t want it to feel too farmhouse. In our powder room, it is only on one wall (check out my powder room reveal here for more pics!) as an accent rather than around the entire room. For our butler’s pantry, we had 3 options: just paint the wall behind our open shelving, tile it with the backsplash that is in our kitchen, or use shiplap. We chose the shiplap because we thought it would be a nice accent with the shiplap that was in the other areas of the house, and it was cheaper than tiling the whole wall.
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Wainscoting // This is probably one of the more “traditional” trim options. We have wainscoting in our dining room. It is 52″ high and painted the same as the rest of the trim in the house. I did consider making the wainscoting higher (to 2/3 of the wall height), but decided it wasn’t worth the cost. Because we did wainscoting on the bottom half of the walls, I went with a darker paint color in our dining room (check out my dining room reveal here!). I also love wallpaper with wainscoting – it’s less overwhelming than wallpapering an entire room.
Tongue and Groove Ceilings // This was a fun addition that we did based on pictures of another house I saw online. We decided early on in the building process to do tongue and groove ceilings on our front porches, but then also added it in our foyer (it is a different color in the foyer than outside). This is basically shiplap on the ceiling – it is the same 6″ pine shiplap with a v-groove, but stained in Weathered Oak instead of painted. To me, this gives the house a little bit more of a “coastal” feel. We picked the stain color based on the color of our hardwood floors.
Beams // I talked about our 5 Best House Building Decisions in another blog post (read it here!) and if I had to pick a 6th, it would probably be vaulting our breakfast nook. It really makes the space feel SO much more open. With the vault, we decided to add a stained beam at the top of the ceiling. We stained the beam the same color as the tongue and groove in the foyer. Based on the color stain, this can really give the space either a coastal or rustic feel. I really tried to balance the different styles in our house to give it a cohesive feel but not lean too much one way or another. I like different things from each style! Also, we did consider adding painted shiplap to the ceiling in here (on either side of the beam) but decided against it to stay in budget!
Coffered Ceiling // This is another more traditional ceiling option. We have this in our living room. It really gives the room a more “custom” feeling than if the ceiling was flat. It is a lot of detail (see the crown molding in each individual box?). I will say that this was included in our house plans, so it wasn’t an upgrade for us to add this trim. This combined with the wainscoting are probably the two most traditional elements in our house (our stairway railing is fairly traditional too). If I didn’t have a little bit of a traditional style, I might have considered doing beams in this room instead of the coffered ceiling.
You can shop all the decor from this post below! Just click on an image to go directly to that product’s site!
We have very tall and big walls in general, so these trim details really help to break up some of the space! Which one is your favorite? Leave me a comment and let me know!
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