Beautiful Board and Batten

Over the past few months, I have been doing a lot of research on different types trim and molding to jazz up our basic box of a home. I decided to try out my ideas in the living room first. Here are a few shots of the room. Not terrible…just basic & beige & boring. The 3 dreaded “B’s”! Ick!

This wall used to be home to the armoir that was moved to the foyer. Needed to make room for the piano that my grandparents so graciously let us have. Do you like the plastic on the lampshade? No..it is not a new trend. I’ll show you what I did with it later…

These windows are crying for new blinds, too.

This room is screaming, “HELP! I need some color and personality!” This post will just focus on personality. I’ll address the color choice later.

Of course, crown molding is always a great option, but I was looking for something a little different. I also wanted a project that I could tackle on my own and board and batten fit the bill. There are a lot of great tutorials out there in blog land, but here is one that I particularly liked over at Centsational Girl.

I modified this tutorial a bit, but I began by sketching out lots of options for this treatment. Entire room? Too much work Up 3/4 of the wall? Nope. Space too big. Up the wall 1/2 way? Nope…design no-no! So, I decided on coming up about 1/3 of the wall like this:

via Centsational Girl

This is the point where I made a road trip to Lowe’s to make some new friends. When I described the project to them, they pointed me in the most economical direction…1/4″ plyboard. This came in an 8′x8′ sheet and would have been enough to do the whole room, but as with any first project you are going to make mistakes (or is that just me). Thicker ply board or MDF would have been a better, chunkier look, but there would have been too much of an overhang on my whimpy baseboards once the vertical boards were in position. So, I stuck with the 1/4″, gave the friendly guy all the dimensions, and away he went to cut all the strips I needed.