Cool Designs Made with PolyCarbonate Walls

Posted by CraftFoxes Staff on Feb 01, 2022

Make walls and rooms and a bubble wall with polycarbonate

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When most people think about designing a new wall or home addition, building materials such as wood, plasterboard, cement and glass usually come to mind. Polycarbonate sheets are rarely at the top of anyone’s shopping list. But they have a number of great applications for building projects, including DIY ones.

Architects have utilized polycarbonate sheets to make office walls, conference room dividers and lighting fixtures. Homeowners don’t work with the plastic material as often, but perhaps they should. Like glass, polycarbonate allows light to stream through it while being more flexible and stronger. A translucent wall material like polycarbonate enables physical separation and sound dampening without the hemmed-in feeling naturally created by an opaque barrier.

Some gardeners prefer the material to glass when building a greenhouse. If you’re going to design a home for your plants, do a little research into each material since polycarbonate and glass greenhouses both have pros and cons.

DIYers considering working with polycarbonate should consider the range of options. For example, some are made with built-in UV ray protection to keep the panel from fading or discoloring in the sun.

While installing the sheets, it important to make sure no water gets inside and you may want to drill weep holes to keep moisture from building up. A power saw will probably come in handy to cleanly cut the material. Below are DIY projects that showcase the possibilities of working with polycarbonate in a mobile home, studio loft, backyard deck, greenhouse and elsewhere.

Bedroom Wall

The hosts of the Youtube channel DIYfferent had a very specific challenge to address. The previous owner of their mobile home had removed one of the walls to get more light into his sleeping space. Now they wanted to add back a bedroom wall for privacy, but hold onto the light. Plus the new plastic wall had to complement a room with wood paneling.

The answer was a semi-translucent polycarbonate wall with wood panel strips for accents. In the video, you’ll also see that a power saw isn’t necessary to cut down the material. Here a utility knife does the job.

Backyard Deck

For a covered back deck, Fardinger used thick polycarbonate sheets for the roof in a place of glass. While some polycarbonate sheets are thin enough to be cut with utility knife, the ones utilized in this build will require a lot more power.

Fardinger also notes some of the special materials that are required to work with the material. For example, if you’re going to use a mastic to seal an edge of polycarbonate sheet, you’ll need to use neutral seal mastic because the general purpose mastic reacts badly with the material.

Greenhouse

Mike from Modern Builds demonstrates how to build a greenhouse with two by fours and corrugated polycarbonate. You can buy acrylic sheets cut to size to build a unique shed in your backyard. The semi-pro tools and time lapse video makes the construction look pretty easy, but if you don’t have those, you may want invest. Mike uses a circular saw for cutting the polycarbonate sheets. To tighten them down to the wood, he opts for screws with rubber gaskets so the plastic can be secured without cracking. Foam closures help waterproof the seal around the corrugated polycarbonate. Check out his tips to installing the polycarbonate over the door so it matches well with the rest of the greenhouse front.

Room Divider

A friend of The Sorry Girls had just moved into a loft studio and wanted to make an enclosed space around her bed. Inspired by a Pinterest post, they built clear plastic room dividers with black frames. While these faux walls were built with plexiglass, the same design can easily be done with polycarbonate. The end result allows for a lot of light and creates the suggestion of separation.

Bubble Wall

Few walls you can make are cooler than a bubble wall. Joy in DIY built one with a combination of a 10 millimeter thick sheet of polycarbonate plastic, aquarium tubing, air pump, LED lights and a few other things. If you look in the comments section of the video on YouTube, one of the viewers explained how he or she improved on the design explained in the video.

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