Wall Paneling for Remodeling Dummies

installing wall paneling

What may well be the most irritating feature of the former Demand Media Studios¹ was their insistence on a minimum word count. Even questions that could have been answered with a simple "Yes, you can," or "No way, José!" had to be padded out to 300 words or more. Interestingly enough, it's often in the padding that eHow.com's more incompetent freelancers managed to trip themselves up through their ignorance. That's not, however, the case today: no, Melissa Lewis, writing for the Demand Media's flagship site eHow.com, attempted to answer the eternal question, "How Thick Is Paneling?" – and failed. Leaf Group's having moved her post to HomeSteady.com didn't change that.

The answer, as just about anyone who's ever installed paneling (a demographic we assume does not include Lewis) could tell you is, "It varies." Just for fun, we took a look at Lowes.com and used their compare tool on "interior wall paneling." Our four random choices yielded thicknesses of 0.135, 0.139, 0.21, and 0.31 inches. Oddly enough, Melissa's answer to the question – buried deep in 319 words of verbiage – was

"The thickness of paneling varies. In general, plywood and most hardwood paneling is 1/2- or 3/4-inch thick. Other thickness are slightly different, measuring 11/16, 9/16 or 5/8 inch thick. MDF is usually the thinnest paneling available, about 1/4-inch thick. Thicker hardwood panelings that are more than 1 inch thick are also available." Is this woman nuts? "[M]ore than 1 inch thick"? Well, no; it's just that during her years of studying for her psychology degree, Lewis never learned the difference between "paneling" and "flooring," plucking the one-inch dimension from some high-end builder's description of planks used for flooring and other thicker dimensions from descriptions of wainscoting.

All that because someone who had no idea what she was talking about – unlike, we would hope, her hundreds of "how-to" articles about cleaning and stains (although we wouldn't bet on it) – had to pad out the real answer: "It depends, so read the specs." Small wonder she's the proud winner of today's Dumbass of the Day award...

¹ also known as DMS, as in "you can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'"; recently renamed "Leaf Group"

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