Board and Batten Wall

I love Board and Batten walls. I’ve just never had many places that one would work well before. Until this house. I knew the minute that I looked at the guest bathroom that this would be a perfect place for one.

To refresh your memory this is what the guest bath looked like when we moved in. It’s a functional bathroom, but the design had seen better days. It’s like a time capsule for the 80’s. Can I get an Amen? The first thing we did was change out the flooring. Once we had moved in and unpacked, I started removing wallpaper. If you’ve ever removed wallpaper you would know why I will NEVER put wall paper in my house again. Nope. Not doin’ it!

By the time I got all of the wallpaper removed and the cabinets and walls painted the holidays were fast approaching. We called a halt to all major projects until after the new year.

The holidays are long gone, and it’s time to get busy finishing a few of the rooms that we started! The first thing on my list in the guest bath was the board and batten wall.

After taking a few measurements, we headed to our local lumber store and picked out the lumber we wanted to use. Full disclosure, we could have done this wall for a much lower price had we used a different lumber. But, after much research, we decided to put up our wall a little differently which required a higher grade of hard lumber. It seems that there are two main ways that most people installed their board and batten walls.Both options had issues that we didn’t want to deal with.

The first option was to glue the boards directly  onto the walls, then add nails.Ummm…no thank you. If I ever wanted to change things up, I knew that I would also be replacing sheet rock. And I thought that removing wallpaper was a nightmare…

The second option was to simply nail the boards to the wall. However, unless you hit a stud there would always be the possiblity of the board popping loose. And realistically, there was no way we could design the wall to do that and it look right. Neither of those appealed to us.

First step:

Remove the existing base molding.

Now here’s where we went in a different direction than most. Instead of installing the boards, piece by piece directly onto the wall, we built the entire wall in the garage before installing.

To hold it together and for added stability we used pocket screws on the back of the frame. It was like a huge picture frame! And solid as a rock. Once we had it built, we then nailed it to the wall making sure we hit studs as much as possible. No chance of boards popping off and it can be fairly easily removed if we ever want to!

For the baseboard we used a 1 x 8″ board.The vertical boards are 1 x 3″ boards. And the top cross board is a 1 x 6″ board.

To finish it off we placed a 1 x 2 ” board across the top.

Next, I caulked every place the boards touched the walls and at the floor. I used wood filler to fill in all nail holes. There were still a few places on the dry wall that needed a little patching also. Once the caulk, sparkle, and filler were dry, I gently sanded everything smooth.

Time for paint! I love this paint. We painted our cabinets with this paint in our last house and it was so durable!

Three coats of paint, installation of the hooks and my board and batten wall was finished! I love it! I still have a few more projects before I can call this room done, but by far I think this is one of my favorite projects that we’ve done in this  house. It just gives that room so much character.

I am toying with painting the wall above the board and batten the same blue that I painted the vanity. But before making that decision, I’m going to live with it as it is for a little while.

Putting in a taller shower curtain, a little mirror project and decorating the rest of the space is on my to do list next. So stay tuned for the finished room!

Until next time…