It's been a busy week at our house! We had a great labor day weekend and a busy start to the week. Over the weekend, a handful of my husband's friends surprised him and came to town from all across the country for a fun and unexpected get together. Even though we don't get to see them but maybe a few times a year, we are so blessed to have such wonderful people in our lives and love every chance we get to spend with them. :) I planned on writing this post yesterday, but unfortunately I was off getting a root canal instead... lucky me! But never mind that, things are looking up, my mouth is less sore, today is Friday, football has officially started (finally!) and our living room board and batten is finished!
I love the look of board and batten and knew I wanted to add it to some space in our home. The perfect space? The living room! Our living room has sort of been neglected since we moved in. It's been painted a few times and we even bought a new rug and couch recently, but other than that I have yet to hang any art or pictures and have a collection of miss-matched furniture in there that needs to eventually get updated. We have lived here for 3 years so it was time I turned my focus to this room. Since we don't have a proper entryway, by adding board and batten to a wall in the living room we sort of created a fake one by creating space to hang some jackets while adding some architectural detail.
This is what the space looked like when we moved in (one before we did anything and the other after we painted and removed the carpet).
I love the look of board and batten and knew I wanted to add it to some space in our home. The perfect space? The living room! Our living room has sort of been neglected since we moved in. It's been painted a few times and we even bought a new rug and couch recently, but other than that I have yet to hang any art or pictures and have a collection of miss-matched furniture in there that needs to eventually get updated. We have lived here for 3 years so it was time I turned my focus to this room. Since we don't have a proper entryway, by adding board and batten to a wall in the living room we sort of created a fake one by creating space to hang some jackets while adding some architectural detail.
This is what the space looked like when we moved in (one before we did anything and the other after we painted and removed the carpet).
The board and batten is going to go on each side of that archway. To get started I painted the living room it's new color and made sure to only paint the top portion of this wall while painting the bottom portion in a white semi-gloss to match my trim. While I love a colored board and batten, I decided ours would look best white to bring a little lightness to the room since the new wall color was so dark.
There are some awesome tutorials out there for board and batten, all a little different. I sort of combined bits and pieces from a few that I liked and came up with my own plan. For ours, we decided to use pre-primed mdf boards in 1/2" thickness. We chose to do the same size boards for both the vertical and horizontal pieces. Some tutorials have the vertical boards being slightly less wide than the upper horizontal boards but I don't mind them being all the same width. Our walls were already smooth so we didn't need to do the "board" part of the board and batten so our supplies list was rather small for this project! All we needed was:
- Pre-primed MDF boards
- Liquid nails
- Paintable white caulk
- Wood filler
- Nail gun and nails (we already had these)
- Paint
I don't have a picture of both of the walls at this stage but once they were both finished with this part my husband filled the holes with wood filler and ran a line of caulk along all of the edges of the boards. He then sanded the places there was wood filler and tagged me in to do the painting! Guys I was so excited for this part and luckily it happened while the babies were napping so I got to do it right away. Talk about instant gratification :)
I have plans to hang some coat hooks on the left wall and some art above both sides, but that is a later post. Drumroll please..... here are the finished walls!
I have plans to hang some coat hooks on the left wall and some art above both sides, but that is a later post. Drumroll please..... here are the finished walls!
What do you think?! I just love the way they turned out :) I can't wait to get some pictures hung and post one good before and after shot of the space!