DIY Board and Batten – Part 1

We’re in the process of redoing our dining room. When we moved in it was pretty plain and an ugly shade of green. I don’t have any before pictures, sorry! We decided to put in faux board and batten. (I will not give a tutorial because there are SO MANY on awesome blogs already). We also painted the top portion of the wall Tricorn Black by SW, color matched to Valspar Primer + Paint. Am I crazy for painting my walls black? Maybe. But I LOOOOVE it!!

 

 

 

 

Board and Batten is fairly simple and straight forward. We ran into a few problems, of course. First of all our dining room walls (and several other walls in our house) are not studs and sheetrock. It’s some kind of cement board? I’m really not sure but if you try to pound a nail in it the wall pits and the nail doesn’t catch on any studs. Guess what we did? Please don’t chase me off the internet 😉 We just used liquid nails!

 

 

 

We figure the boards are light enough since it’s just thin plywood. I’ll let you know if we wake up one morning and all of the boards are on the floor. Our next problem was getting our boards cut right. We bought 2 big 4×8 sheets of plywood (and we have LOTS leftover) and had our local home improvement store cut them into 3 inch strips. We got home and realized they were very uneven. Boo 🙁 So, we went to a different store and tried again, and BINGO! Straight cuts! Thank you Home Depot!

 

 

 

 

I’ll share the finished walls tomorrow. The claw hand I had for a week was totally worth it. We love the end results. We still have a long way to go in this room. We need a rug, art and I bought a light fixture to replace the world’s ugliest chandelier. Check back soon for those updates!