We love this very practical, very stylish idea from Oink Studio: a plywood-lined niche set in a sheetrock wall. Baltic Birch’s stripey uniform plies make for a pleasing natural edge that gives a crisp furniture feel with an organic edge. Here’s what you need to know…
Aluminum or steel sheetrock framing lends itself to creating special pockets and niches in the voids within the walls (which can be made as deep as you like). In fact, we’ve always hated how much wasted storage space there is hiding between sheetrock studs and thought all sorts of niches and storage should be built in. (Our bathtub head niche is a fine example.)
As usual with good ideas we find, we hunted for images that illustrated how it might be done. In the process we came across an obsession we hadn’t considered: DRYWALL, in form of Pinterests solely about Drywall. Drywall Mud, our favorite, had some excellent images.
Here’s what a rough idea of what a sheetrock niche might look like before lining with Baltic Birch (in this case, it’s to house a flat screen tv):
As you can see, the outside edges of the niche have been finished as you would any sheetrock corner.
Then you’d line the niche with the carefully cut, sanded and finished Baltic Birch plywood. The key is to have the birch edges sit proud of the drywall slightly. We learned why the hard way when renovating our Laboratory. When the carpenter built the plywood fridge enclosure, he recommended making it flush with the drywall to the right of the fridge. We were too worn down at that point to wrap our head around it.
Everyone but him knows that it is not possible to get wood flush with drywall which by nature can be slightly irregular. When we painted the enclosure, we saw how impossible it was to get a neat seam, resulting in a not-great detail.
If we had stepped the wood fridge enclosure back slightly, your eye wouldn’t notice any imperfections. And we realize now, it would soften the boxiness of the enclosure.
You can see in this example of niches, the wood is not flush, but pulled forward slightly. As is Oink Studio’s.
Lesson learned.
