How To Make DIY Faux Wood Beams: Step-by-Step Tutorial

Thank you to DAP for sponsoring this DIY faux wood beams tutorial! All opinions are entirely my own. This post also contains affiliate links, but nothing that I wouldn’t recommend wholeheartedly. Read my full disclosure here.

After we opened up the walls to the kitchen and living room for our big dining room renovation, we need to figure out how to finish the opening. Originally we thought we would just trim them out like any other cased opening. But then the idea of wood beams dawned on us! 

I’ve always had real wood beams on my wish list, but they are crazy expensive so we’ve never incorporated them into our renovations. When Logan said he thought he could build something faux with the look of wood beams, I was thrilled! 

He designed a U-shaped channel of three pieces of wood that would wrap around the edges of our opening. After a ton of time and energy with the manual labor of distressing the wood by hand, this was one of the most time consuming DIY projects we’ve ever taken on. 

How To Make DIY Faux Wood Beams: Step-by-Step Tutorial

Step 1: Choose the type of wood & buy lumber

For the first step, you have to decide on a type of wood for your DIY faux wood beam. We opted for oak because we like grain patterns and the hardness and durability of the wood.

When it comes to oak, you can choose between white oak and red oak. We decided on red oak to save some money because it is more affordable. 

You can use other types of wood, like cedar, but they are softer and lighter, but it wasn’t quite the look we were going for. 

Next, you need to buy your lumber. Be sure to take your time and check multiple stores to find consistent grain patterns between all of the boards. 

You also need to check if the boards are straight. You want to avoid warped boards. Check each board by holding it up and looking down the edge to see if it bends. 

If any wood needs to be cut down to size when you purchase it, leave a couple of inches of wiggle room on the length so you can trim it down to size later.

Make a plan where you will be installing the beams to see if you need to rip the wood down to smaller sizes before moving on. Your U-shaped beam should fit snug over the opening.  

Step 2: Join boards

Start by grouping the boards based on how the grains line up. The goal is to have the grains look the same where the boards will be joined. Remember we’ll be building U-shaped beams so three boards will be joined together.

For the joinery, we used butt joints with dowels. This process is relatively simple. First, mark your boards every 12” and then drill a pilot hole with a ⅛” drill bit on both faces of the wood that will be joined. Next, make the holes slightly larger with a ⅜” drill bit.

With your dowel holes drilled, apply DAP WELDWOOD Professional Wood Glue inside each hole, all along the edges of your oak boards and on the dowels. Gently the dowels in the holes.  

Grab a rubber mallet, align all the dowel holes and hammer the boards together. Lastly, clamp the boards together and allow for this butt joint to dry for a few hours.

Step 3: Distress wood

Note: If you don’t want to have your DIY faux wood beams distressed, you can skip this step of course! 

While the glue dries on the butt joint of the first two pieces, you can distress the third piece of wood which will complete the U-shape of the beam. Once the other two pieces that you joined together are dry, you can also distress them. 

We’ll share more details about exactly how we distressed the wood in another tutorial, but here is our general process for the rustic look. 

We used the following tools to distress our beams:

• Hand planer
• Hammer
• Hatchet
• Blow torch 
• Nail punch
• Drill with wire wheel
• Orbital sander with 220-grit sandpaper

Follow up by unclamping the boards you joined (once they are dry) and distressing them as well. You can put the L-shape along the edge of your workbench for more stability while distressing. 

Distressing the wood by hand took a ton of time…I’m talking 4-5 hours per board! But I think it was totally worth the extra step. Do you agree? 

Step 4: Attach the third piece of wood to the beam

Now it is time to attach the other side of the wood beam to make that U-shape. Repeat the same doweling process above in Step 2, clamp, and let dry.

Step 5: Distress the joints

After the third oak board is attached and dried, the next step is to try to blend out the butt joints so they become a little invisible using the same tools. 

Step 6: Sand beams

Using an orbital sander and 220-grit sandpaper. Take the time here to sand down and find any loose slivers that can cause splinters before moving on. We have young kids so wanted to make sure nothing would get stuck in little hands when we installed them. 

Use an air compressor and blow out all the sawdust after you’re done sanding. 

Step 7: Stain

If you are staining your beams then now is the time to apply it. We went with this grey color to give it that really aged look but any color will do. Be careful when applying you may find a stray splinter while doing so.

Oak wood takes stain really well, but if you’re using different types of wood that are harder to stain, like pine boards, you may want to consider a wood conditioner before stain. It really goes a long way to help give a nice even stain color to your wood planks. 

Step 8: Apply wax finish

Finally, apply a wax finish. This final layer helps protect the wood but also it helps fill in any holes or potential loose slivers in the beams. 

Alternatively, you could choose another type of finish for your wood beams, like polyurethane or lacquer. However, if you choose to distress your DIY faux wood beams, like we did, we recommend the wax to give it a matte look that realistically looks aged. 

Step 9: Trimming down beams

As mentioned before, we left our beams a few inches longer than needed to give us some wiggle room. Now is the time to cut them down before installing them. 

Measure where they are going to go and trim them down with a circular saw.

Anytime you make a cut you need to re-distress the cut side and restain so it matches the rest of the beam. 

Step 10: Install beams

Start with the header beam. Bring it inside and push it up into place.

Secure it with clamps or have someone else hold it in place. If the beam isn’t a super tight fit around your header post, you may want to add a few nails here. 

When it comes to adding the vertical posts, you can use a bottle jack, which will help slightly lift up the header beam so you can slide the posts in more easily.

After both vertical posts are in, you can let down the header beam by releasing the bottle jack. 

If you don’t have a bottle jack on hand, you can have someone hold the header into place and pound the post beams in with a rubber mallet or sledgehammer. But be sure you use a beater block so you don’t damage the wood.  

We also had a second wood beam to do because our room had two openings.

Step 11: Secure beams

Lastly, secure the DIY faux wood beams with 2” finish nails. When nailing your beams try to nail them in places that will be easy to hide with DAP Blend Sticks. This usually means you target grains or knots to nail through.

Step 12: Cover nail holes

DAP Blend Sticks work great to repair the nail holes on the DIY faux wood beams. Since we had such a unique wood stain color and a lot of variation in the wood from the distressing, regular wood filler would have just made the nail holes stand out more. However, the Blend Sticks can be combined to get the perfect match for any color of wood. 

We started with the darkest stick from the True Browns set and then followed up with a gray stick from the Neutral Woods set. Simply rub the stick over the holes to fill them. 

You can see after we used the Blend Sticks on a couple of the nail holes, you can hardly tell they were nailed to the framing.

Installing DIY faux wood beams on your ceiling rather than an opening? You’ll want to find the ceiling joists using a stud finder and add blocks there. Then each hollow beam can be attached over each block along the length of the ceiling.  

I am totally obsessed with the end result! And I’m so glad that it is pretty much the first thing you seem when you walk into our home. They look so authentic you would never know they aren’t real! 

Even though the DIY faux wood beams were a lot of work to build, I’m so glad that we did it.  It’s all about the architectural details when it comes to these big renovation projects.