DIY Board and Batten: Part 1

Happy Monday friends. I hope you all had a fab weekend!

We’ve decided to break down the remaining living room/dining room progress into mini-topics. There are just SO many projects going now that our posts would be HUGE if we kept it all together. Capiche?

First up the Board and Batten progress. We are certainly not the first ones to do this type of wainscoting, but it was something I really wanted to try out on our twenty eight foot long wall in the “backroom” (aka the living and dining rooms) as well as the eight foot section where the TV cupboard used to be, shown below.  Just to add some character and to avoid painting the entire wall lime green – cause that might be just a bit much!

Basically the project planning was pretty simple. The “board” is of course just the existing drywall, so no measuring needed (my kind of project!). For the “chair rail” we measured the horizontal spaces between all the windows and doorways which gave us the total length we needed. We used four 1″ x 4″ x 8′ pieces of spruce for this.

The next step was figuring how high to put the chair rail (which would also determine the height of each batten). Dean wanted to simplify and cut 8 foot lengths of spruce in half  putting the height of the chair rail at 48″ (4 feet). I didn’t think that was high enough. So we drew horizontal lines on the wall at 4 feet, 5 feet and 6 feet. Then stepped back to take a look. In the end we both decided that 6 feet was a good height.

Also, initially we thought we’d put a battens about every 12 inches. But of course we had to adjust for the pass through, light switches, electrical outlets, doorways, etc.  And when it came down to it, 12 inches seemed too close. In the end, most of our battens are approximately 16 inches apart (center to center). Our battens are cut from 1″ x 2″ x 8′ spruce.

So with measurements in hand and helpers in tow, off to the Depot we went!

Once home again, Dean cut the chair rail and put it up (I took the kids to the park).

Then we started under the pass through with the battens.

We spaced two battens equally under the pass through and then spaced the others out from there. If you have shorter windows than our floor to ceiling windows you’d adjust for this too.

If a batten happened to fall on an outlet we just moved it a bit. When you stand back and look you can’t really tell the spacing is slightly different.

*Please note that Dean angled the edges of the chair rail and the battens at all the existing trim because the new trim is much thicker. He called it chamfered (this is the term he’d use at work).

The next step is to caulk the gaps and fill any large nail holes. Then we’ll paint it all out in the same colour as the wall and previous trim (Behr’s Swiss Coffee).

What do you think?

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