Wide Plank Nickle Ship Lap From Old Bleachers

I live in a century home. When fixing up our dining room and mud room, I mean gutting it to the studs and redoing everything because the plaster was failing, I wanted to install some ship lap to keep the historic feel of the home. I wanted to do this partly because the historic nature of the home but also partly because the ceilings and walls are so far out of square the drywall is difficult to install even remotely square and has to be shimmed everywhere. And maybe because my wife is obsessed with ship lap/the Magnolia farms stuff.

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The new ship lap you find at a home store is junk. Well it has a purpose but it is mainly designed to go over drywall to give the look of ship lap on the cheap. I wanted traditional 3/4 inch thick ship lap to match the historic nature of the home but also be the structural wall material for the house. If you can find that style, it is so crazy expensive it is out of reach to most homeowners, or it is out of fast growth pine and it warps and bleeds the tanins from the knots for years. To do this, I needed stable lumber, cheap enough to afford, but also high quality. I sourced bleachers, yes bleachers out of an old school. I found the bleachers online on facebook marketplace and purchased them as a lot. I had enough to do the project, plus maybe some baseboards as well.

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Read on to learn about the fun of recycling old lumber from a school creating ship lap and a few baseboards for my home.

****Tools****

Miter Saw

Table saw

Router

Planer

Hand Power Planer

Dust collector

Shop Vac

sand paper

hand sander

drill/ bits/ countersink bit

Tape measure / marker

Square

Paint roller and brush

Spacers - to lay out boards- I made them from the scraps

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****Supplies****

Old pine bleachers $350 dollars on facebook

Bondo or wood filler $30 dollars

primer and paint $120

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*****Safety Gear*****

Safety Glasses

Ear Protection

Gloves

Face Shield

Work Boots

The first thing I had to do was go through the boards and make sure I had pieces that would work. Old bleachers have holes in them from bolts, and notches from where they stacked up. They even had some metal plates at the ends of a few where support brackets for what I assume were hand rails. Some had cracks on the ends, or old carvings of Jenna Loves Tommy with a heart, and gum, lots of ancient gum. Some were damaged in areas beyond repair and would need removed. I wanted to use as many full length boards as possible to have minimal joints and showcase the long wide plank boards. I was able to cut down several of them longer boards into shorter sections removing the bad parts to use in areas that needed short pieces. They started out at 12 feet long and most were cut down to 10 foot or so.

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After cutting to length I had to rip them to width with a table saw. The boards were different in widths. Some were just 10 inches, most were 11, and a few were 12. Most of the boards had one edge that was fairly good, with no notches etc. They were just weathered and worn from lots of feet and seats on them for years. I ripped that edge as close as I could to remove the damage and then set my table saw up to cut the opposite side off to remove the notch and give me the width I wanted, about 8 inches wide. These wider ripped edge pieces would be used later for stacking the boards up to dry when painting. The super thin rips were used as shims as most were 1/16 to 1/8th inch. All the extra that didn't become shims have become fire kindling.

Once all of the boards were cut to rough length I had to get the old finish off. I used a 12 inch planer to run the boards through to just skim the surface and take maybe 1/16th of an inch off in 2 passes. This removed the old finish, smoothed the boards a bit from any wear, and left me a good surface to adhere paint to. The planer leaves the surface fairly smooth as I had good blades on it, but not furniture quality smooth as to get there you have to sand with multiple grits to at least 220. I left it this way, un-sanded, as I wanted the grain to show once painted so you could tell it was actual wood and not a cheap composite. Super smooth is not the look I wanted but it might be what you want. If so, you would need to sand to the desired grit.

Ship lap is aptly named due to a lap joint in the boards. To create the lap, I used a router to cut the half lap on the boards. Both long sides got the half lap. The shorter boards or ends of the boards where they would tuck into a finish piece also had a lap cut. I wore a face shield here as the router bit was creating shrapnel with the wood as it chipped it out. It literally threw daggers out which may or may not have embedded through clothing and skin a few times. It even punctured through the 6 mil plastic I had up to keep the dust down, 15 feet away. In hindsight I should probably have done multiple passes at a lower depth to get the final cut and avoid the daggers. But I had 50 boards to lap and it was already taking hours of router time so I took aggressive passes.

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This could be done by a hand held router but I used a make shift router table for a few reasons. One was to try to keep the boards flat against the bit using a fence. I had a helper as the boards were 12 feet long and a touch difficult to handle solo. But the table also allowed me to attach some dust collection to keep some of the dust and chips down. There were a few times where I didn't keep the board flat like I thought and when I went to dry fit them (test the joinery) , they stuck up or out too much and wouldn't fit. I had to hand route or chisel those at that time to fix it prior to painting.

As I said at the start, there were a lot of holes due to bolts and screws holding the bleachers together when they were in a school. I mixed up bondo in small batches and filled the holes in each board. Once this dried I went over the bondo with Elmers wood filler twice, sanding in between coats to fix the voids and make the gaps as smooth as I could. The wood glue filler works better to sand than the bondo does so it gives a nicer finish once painted. At this point, the boards were hit once with a very light sanding, not not remove the grain, but to keep the finish looking consistent with the wood grain and wood filler. I think I used 120 grit at best to just level everything out, focusing on the areas with filler.

How do you paint 50 boards at once, inside your house, in winter? I used the cut offs from the bleachers and made board racks. Basically 2.5 inch wide boards by 4 feet. Then I attached little blocks to the ends so they would stack up with a layer of painted boards in the middle. This let me stack all the boards on top of each other as they dried. These are now a permanent structure in my shop. I have used them to paint cnc signs, siding, trim, and door frames, etc. They are amazing and functional in so many ways.

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I primed all of the boards with a latex wood primer, then top coat painted them twice with a hard enamel paint for the finish coat. This was done with a roller and brush. The enamel smooths out nicely as it dries and removes almost all brush strokes as long as you put it on at the correct thickness. The trick here was I had three different but similar colors to paint. Part of the shiplap was for my dining room ceiling and part was for the mudroom walls. Then I had baseboards i had cut too. They were all varying colors of white/ cream.

The mudroom walls were put up with finish brad nails on the studs. I was leaving them with the nailed look as the finish. I had to carefully shoot the nails even per board with the 16 gauge nail gun. These boards were also tucked into finished trim on the edges. I had leveled the walls fairly well but I still had to shim out boards here and there to get them even. Lots of custom cuts to get everything right, including around light switches, and baseboard heaters. Corner trim was added to finish the look.

The dining room ceiling was far from fun. The old ceiling joists were not level to themselves or the world. I planed down almost an inch off the centers of several boards just to try to get them even with the others. I built up with shims, 2x4s and anything else I could to get them more even and hide as much of the bow and dips as I could. From one end of the room to the other, the laser level showed the ceiling dropped by 5 inches. yeah, I wasn't fixing that but I could make it look better than it had.

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Due to the boards being so far off, I used 2 screws per joist, counter set into the wood. I also used construction adhesive above and every board was custom shimmed to get it close to flat with the boards next to it. I used a 4 foot level just to test flatness, not level and would pull screws out a bit, add another thin shim and sink the screw again. This was a long process and not one I ever want to do again. So much frustration as the ceiling was so messed up.

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The edges of the boards were going to be covered by trim and drywall so they did not have to be perfectly cut to line up in trim board grooves like the mudroom. I just had to leave a gap for expansion to make sure they didn't buckle.

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After the boards were all attached and dried, I had to make sure the screws were counter sunk enough and then cover them with wood filler twice, sand smooth, paint over the areas, then paint the entire ceiling once more to get a smooth even finish coat surface.

I used the last of the bleacher boards for baseboards. I cut them to 5 inch widths, and rounded over the top edge slightly with sand paper. These were used to finish the look in the dining room, kitchen, hallway, laundry, and mudroom. You could say I had quite a project over the last year. but it came out great, and I really like the wide plank lap and baseboards.

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All the baseboards were attached with 16 gauge brad nails, nail holes filled, a bead of caulk added to the top against the walls, and final painted once more.

This was an overall fun but time consuming project reusing bleachers from an old school and giving them years of new life in my home as ship lap and a few baseboards. I am happy with the results and thrilled I was able to save some old lumber from the landfill or burn pile. It is fun to create something out of a repurposed item. I mean really, who would have thought bleachers could become beautiful ship lap.

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I thought the finished look matched my historic home well. Now the only problem is my wife likes them so much she is eyeing other rooms that "need" shiplap too.......