DIY Corrugated Tin Wall Tutorial
Adding an accent wall is a great way to update a room without the commitment of updating every wall. And because it’s just one wall, you can do something a little more flashy than if you were doing all 4 walls, and use that one featured wall as a major talking point and style statement for the whole room (or the whole house). Karen (who you’ll remember from her sewing table beverage station and dresser to hall tree bench) has been updating her weekend country house and she wanted a wall treatment to reflect the rustic vibe in the rest of the room, so she and her husband settled on this corrugated tin wall:
And the best news is — it’s not as hard as you think! Read below for Karen’s instructions on installing the corrugated metal wall. If you prefer a more aged look, you can use this tip from The Ragged Wren for aging the sheet metal, and if you’re not sure if the metal is for you, you can also easily and inexpensively create an accent wall with paint, wood, or wainscoting:
How to Install an Easy Corrugated Tin Wall
by Karen of The Weekend Country Girl
Hello from Texas. My name is Karen and I am a weekend country girl. Our weekend house is a little “near the lake” cabin that we have been enjoying and working on for the past 8 years. We have totally reconfigured our front room over the years to allow for more comfortable seating and accommodate a flat screen television. We removed a door and put in a set of french doors where large windows once were. After all that moving around, I wanted an accent wall that reflected our rustic vibe in the room. Hubby and I came up with the idea of a corrugated tin wall for the room.
Putting a tin wall up in a room is not as challenging as I thought it might be. In my brain it was going to be some super complicated process that would take forever to get done. If you can use a saw, a drill, a level and a stud finder you can do this project.
The tin comes in a variety of lengths and is is 26 1/2 inches wide. The tin allows for an inch and a half overlap to screw the sheets together . We opted to have the tin go from floor to ceiling in one continuous piece on our sloped ceiling room so that meant we needed three 12 foot sections and three 10 foot sections for our wall.
To actually attach the tin to the sheet rock walls there are a few steps we had to take. First we found the studs in the walls and marked them. It was awesome to be able to just write directly on the walls for this part. Usually we are using blue tape to mark our walls.
The next step involves this wavy wood called furring strips that has to be attached to the wall in order to have something to screw the curvy tin to. We used a level to mark lines where we wanted the wood strips to go then attached them with our framing nailer. We could have used screws or hammered nails into the furring strips but the nailer made quick work of getting it up. The trick to installing the wood strips is to make sure that the peaks and valleys line up vertically. That meant cutting of the end of one set so that the first of each section was a valley. Am I making sense here?
After the strips were attached, we got busy with the tin. The first piece we attached was at the highest point.
My husband is a math teacher. Figuring out the angle of the roof-line was his business. Once he got the angle all sorted out, he got out the scariest tool we own in my opinion. the grinder. I am irrationally terrified of the sparks. Hubby cut the pieces to fit leaving a a half inch gap at the bottom of each panel.
After each piece was cut the metal they were screwed into the furring strips with these screws that are specially designed for the tin. The one tip I would give here is to make sure the screws line up horizontally. We have one that is a little lower than the others and it drives me crazy.
We used a piece of cedar trip to trim out the top of the tin and the edges. The bottom is getting a section of painted 1 X 4 as a baseboard.
We love the rustic, industrial look of the wall. It really fits in well at our weekend cabin.
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Thanks so much for sharing with us, Karen! Such a big impact for a relatively small amount of work.
Remodelaholics, go check out the rest of Karen’s amazingly creative projects at The Weekend Country Girl (and stay tuned because she has more to share with us here on Remodelaholic!)
Lorene has been behind the scenes here at Remodelaholic for more than a decade! She believes that planning projects and actually completing them are two different hobbies, but that doesn't stop her from planning at least a dozen projects at any given time. She spends her free time creating memories with her husband and 5 kids, traveling as far as she can afford, and partaking of books in any form available.
Hi Karen,
Your wall looks great, and your instructions are simple and easy to follow. I have one question though. How do you install the trim? Is there furring strips behind the trim and metal to keep the metal from “smashing” down? Do you nail the trim to the furring strips?
I have wanted to do something like this for some time now, but dont know how to install the trim. Everything else is a snap.
Hi Dean,
Thanks for the question. I’ll pass this along to Karen, but from looking at the pictures closely (the last two finished pictures) you can see the screws in the upper trim so it appears that the trim was attached using the same screws at the peaks of the corrugation. Hope that helps!
Cass,
We we laid the rough cedar wood on top of the high part of the waves and screwed through that. There is that wood piece underneath to. We didn’t do anything with the valley part. The room has a rustic look so it fit right in. I hope this helps.
Thank you for the info, Karen!