Board and Batten!

         After completing my first board and batten job early in the month I was able to take my new found skill and expertise to our master bedroom! I wanted to make it the focus of the room and we wanted it to be very bold and set the master bedroom apart from the rest of the home. So with much debate we decided that on our largest wall I would install board and batten from the floor to the ceiling and paint the wall black! (It was my idea to go black but, it was the wife that kept reassuring me that it would look great in the end) And just to make sure the room wasn't going to shrink by going to dark we went with an off white color for the other walls.

          All in all it was a smoothly executed project. I used the same techniques as I did in the baby's room but it went a lot faster from start to finish. I would say it took me a good 15 hours or so with all of the prep work for painting, prepping the boards, and the finishing touches. It's funny to note that I can never just do a simple project I always see something else wrong or have a great idea to enhance another portion of the surrounding project but I will always end up changing more than what we originally planned for. My brother in-law brought over some of his extra tall base boards that he had lying around from his projects and I ended up changed all of the base boards. I also ended up changing all of the electrical sockets with new face plates while doing my main project. From the pictures I hope you can see how beautiful it ended up being!

Baby's Room Done!

The journey for this room has been a long one. From where it started and to where it sits now is like night and day. I started this project with high hopes in making it a beautiful room for my soon to be new baby boy to grow up in. From the beginning I knew I wanted board and batten to be the main focus in the room. I searched blog after blog to find the best practice to make this happen. Along the way I took information from every credible source that I found. first thing lets take a look at how the room started out.

For the first year we lived in this house this little 10 x 10 room was just used as our storage unit. It definitely had the most color in the home with this "beautiful" wall paper. Can I just ask what in the hell possessed people to hang nasty wall paper!?!?!?! I cant tell you how many times I cursed the person who put this crap up, but after 2 days of scoring, scraping and washing the walls I finally got down to the original painted walls. I used DIF as my product of choice which I do recommend my only advice is get the big jug of concentrate that you mix with warm water and put that stuff on liberally! FYI If you are shy with the product the wall paper will kick your butt!

After filling all of the pin holes from the teenage girl who lived in the home prior to us moving in I was able to start cutting in and rolling the walls. I previously measured how high I wanted my board and batten to go up the wall and only painted the Gray (Granite Gray by Glidden) to that point It was a total of 2 coats for the gray and also 2 for the white. I ended up throwing a fresh coat of paint in the closet and ceiling (only the best for my boy).

Once painting was completed I could install the board and batten. I took a lot of time on the prep work which translated into a great finishing product. I went to Home Depot and bought two 8 x 4 sheets of 1/2" MDF which was around 30 bucks each. I took advantage of their free cutting station and had the gentleman cut those two sheets into 22 - 4" strips (FYI something I found out is that because of the thickness in the blade you end up losing about a half inch on the last board. So if you are planning on getting just enough out of your sheet take that into calculation) so in the end I had 2 strips that were 3 1/2" wide. Also I did 2 sheets of MDF because we are doing more board and batten in the master bedroom which I will post when that project is completed.

First thing I did was sand the MDF to get it nice and smooth on the edges from the cuts. Fallowing the sanding I primed each strip with Gripper (from Glidden) this ensured that the MDF would not soak up all of my paint. I painted my boards with the white before putting them on the wall (this may have been unnecessary because I ended up painting them again while on the wall and it was a lot easier to paint) Once the prep was done the boards went up rather quickly I used liquid nails to glue the MDF to the wall and finished them off with 2 inch nails from my compressor nail gun.

Filling the nail holes and mending the joints I used DryDex spackling that goes on pink and when it drys turns white. I also used a paint-able caulk from DAP to make everything look seamless. I finished it all off with another coat of paint and did some touch up work on the gray from spots that I was heavy handed with the white paint.

All in all the project went really well and we love this room makeover. Now we just need to find the important things to fill the space.