This week my girlfriend has decided she wants wall panelling. I’m not much of a DIY man, but give me 10 minutes, a YouTube video and a cup of coffee and I’ll become an expert in any domain.
Important note: if you’re about to embark on this journey, don’t use nails, it’ll take you 10x as long having to fill/sand/paint. Glue it to the wall, I’ve used this glue for subsequent walls and it works a treat!
Wall panelling
Wall panelling seems to be the craze right now, you wouldn’t see an empty wall on an influencers Instagram that’s for sure. It’s simply planks of MDF nailed or glued to the wall and then painted to give the appearance of a panelled wall.
There were a few things that I needed to figure out to get this panelling right.
- How do I determine the distance between each panel, ensuring it’s equidistant and there’s a panel on the left-most and right-most part of the wall?
- How many panels should I have on the wall?
- What about my plug socket? If I find the optimum number of panels, what if one of the panels has to go through the plug socket? I really can’t be arsed with moving the socket.
To play around with these numbers, I decided to create a tool to do just that.
I wrote the program using p5.js, in the p5.js editor.
How to use the calculator
The calculator uses CMs, so measure your wall’s height/width as well as the skirting board. Then find the height/width of your panels and pop them into the calculator. Then it’s just a case of playing around with the panel count to see which looks the best.
Obstructions
If you have an obstruction such as a plug, toggle “Show obstruction”. Then specify the distance from the left wall and the distance from the ceiling. Then choose the width/height of the obstruction.
The maths
First of all, we need to figure out how many gaps there are, the gap is the bit between two planks of wood:
This is just the number of planks – 1. So there are 5 gaps above because there are 6 planks.
gap = planks - 1Next, we need to calculate the gap between each panel, whilst still ensuring we have a panel on either end of the wall.
spacingWidth = (wallWidth / gaps) - panelWidth / gaps;This will give us this:
And to calculate the gap width, all you need to do is take away the width of a panel.
gapWidth = spacingWidth - panelWidth
Hopefully, other people can make use out of the calculator, it’s definitely made my life easier. If this blog helped you out then maybe you could benefit from my Wall Paint Calculator, after all, you’re probably gonna need to do some painting now aren’t you? ?
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Thanks so much for the calculator, so easy to see and visualise. Now just down to my own diy skill to see how it turns out!
For some reason it missed off the end panel (batten). For example 264 cm width, 6.9cm battens, 5 gaps, 6 panels however the output of 45.6cm adds up to 5×45.5=227.5 246-227.5=36.5cm / 6 = 6cm batten where as with my wood at 6.9cm I actually only get in 5 panels (perfectly I should say). Great tool and helpful but I wonder how I went wrong?
Hi Tom thank you for your comment you highlighted a bug with the code, unfortunately, it wasn’t parsing the decimal value correctly for your example. Hopefully now if you plug in your numbers again you should get the value you expect for the gaps. I’m really sorry about this, quite embarrassing on my behalf, I hope your wall is looking good!
Quick response, it’s going well all primed from my afternoons work, just deciding whether to squeeze one in or leave it be. Appreciate the tool
Hi Luke, great calculator thanks! Made my life so much easier when panelling for the first time. Hope you don’t mind but I shared it with a few others on my Insta ‘home account’. I couldn’t see an insta account to tag you. Thanks again.
HI, this is fab- used it for my bedroom, thanks 🙂 Want to use it for my lounge but i have 2 plugs and an electric fuse thing. How can i plug in more than one obstruction. Thanks
Hi JG, thank you so much for the comment. The tool didn’t support multiple obstructions, but I’ve just updated it now for you, hope that helps!
Omg, thank you so much!! You are a genius 🙌
Is there any chance you could modify this somehow for a full height wall panelling at all?
Am I missing the part where it says what width the battens would be ?
It’s “Panel Width” in the widget
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Hi, I am looking to panel a whole room with walls of varying lengths. I can see by using the calculator I could work out one wall but then unsure how to continue the other walls. Would I still put a button at each end, but then the gap spacing would be different or should I just continue the same spacing all around and not have battens at each end? Hope I’m making sense! Thanks
hi, does this allow for a bottom panel running along the width of the wall on top of the skirting board?
Hi Nicola, if you’re going to have a bottom panel running along your skirting board then you can use this tool by setting the Wall Height to the distance between your skirting board and your ceiling. Hope that helps.
Hi Luke, sorry I mean a horizontal panel all the way along the bottom that the vertical panels will sit on top of. If I set the wall height to distance from top of skirt to ceiling, won’t it skew the vertical panel height measurement as it won’t take into account the depth of the rail at the bottom that the vertical panel is sat on? Do I just need to subtract the width of the bottom rail off the vertical panel height? Sorry if that makes no sense!?!
Hi yeah it does make sense. I presume you’re wanting to do panelling all the way to your ceiling? What you can do in the tool is just completely forget about your skirting board and assume the panelling is just sitting on top of it. I know that it’s called “Skirting Height” but just think of that as your bottom panel’s height. Then just make sure the height of your wall doesn’t consider the bottom squirting and you should be good to go.
Hi, no I want to do 3/4 height panelling and have a piece of panel running horizontally all the way along top of skirting board then have the vertical rails sitting on top of that, forming the panels. so it would be like the top panel that runs all the way across wall, on top of vertical panels, the same but at the bottom. so it would go skirt, horizontal bottom piece all the way across top of skirt to other side of wall, then all the vertical pieces sat on top of it, then another horizontal piece, on top running all the way across the wall. I couldn’t figure out where in the tool to add the bottom piece that sits on top of the skirt. so sorry for being confusing, don’t want to get it wrong as having wood cut to size.
Hi Nicola, I’ve made a tweak to the calculator as I think your scenario is probably the most common. Hope that helps.