Dining Room Board and Batten

I finally finished my dining room wall that has been 7 months in the making. It really didn't take very long once I got started. My husband and I probably spent a total 3 hours on Saturday putting it all up and filling in nail holes, and that time includes going to Home Depot and having them cut the wood. Anyway, I'll just let the pictures do the talking for a second, that's all we care about anyway.

I love that now when you walk in the front door you don't see a huge empty wall anymore, you see this! And once I get some art up there it will be even better.

Now onto the technical stuff. Since there are literally thousands of tutorials for this out there in blog land I will spare you most of the boring details. But here is a quick rundown of what we did. The first step was to paint the wall. Since we have textured walls I debated weather I would do the real board and batten or the fake. Doing it the real way would have required buying a huge sheet of mdf  and applying it to the wall. I decided to forgo the mdf and just paint it. In the end if I hated how it looked with the textured wall, I would just cut the mdf to fit between the battens and put it up later. I realized that this would be a lot more work, but I'm just trying to save money over here.

Next we went to Home Depot, bought the wood, and had them cut it there for us. I used 3 1/2 inch wide sheets of primed mdf for the vertical battens and 5 1/2 inch wide mdf board for the top. In all the wood cost about $50. Most people paint the battens before they put them up, but we decided to just go ahead and put them up first. I really didn't notice that painting them after they were up was any harder than it would have been if I did it first.

Next, we decided to put the top, vertical, on first. The Home Depot guy was not the most accurate and none of our boards came out the same length. So we decided it would be best to have them flush at the top and then fill in any gaps at the bottom.

To apply everything we first did a squiggly, I'm getting real technical here, of liquid nails and slapped it on the wall. We then followed with four or five nails for support. We used my dad's nail gun, but a hammer and nails would work too. Those guys aren't going anywhere!

Once we got everything up, I then went through and Spackled all the nail holes and gaps. I then caulked all the edges. Caulking made it look so much nicer and finished.

Before Caulk

After caulk

Finally, I painted, and turned it all into this: