Easy Board & Batten

Another quarantine project Stephen and I attempted was adding board and batten in our kitchen’s breakfast nook! We did a lot of research on the best way to install the wood pieces, and figured out a very easy way to make it happen.

I started off by painting all of the pieces of wood outside. Stephen painted the wall up to the point where the trim would be. He then installed long 1x4s horizontally across the top of the paint, making sure the wood was perfectly level. BEGINNER’S TIP: This was one of the toughest, yet most important, things- leveling the long pieces of trim. We recommend having two people hold the wood on each end and put a longer level in the middle, then nail the wood in place.

Once the trim was installed, we went around and marked on the wall where each piece of upright trim would go. We measured out the same distance- in our case, we did 24 inches from the middle of one board to the middle of the next. This can easily be adjusted depending on what kind of look you want!

When we started researching about doing this project, there was one issue that other bloggers kept coming across. If you use a 1×4 for your vertical boards, when they meet your baseboards, they will stick out a good 1/2 inch from your baseboards and look funny. People solved this by either using a tool to trim the bottom of the boards to make the ends thinner to rest on the baseboards, or by ripping out their baseboards and replacing them with new baseboards that were 1″ thick.

Well, we weren’t really feeling either one of those options! 🙂 We wanted this to be an easy project, not one where we are having to pull out all of our baseboards (because you know they connect throughout the whole downstairs… that would be a nightmare). We found the PERFECT boards at Lowe’s. They were pre-cut, 4 foot long pieces of manufactured wood. They were about 1/4 inch thick, which was exactly the width of the baseboards. We just made sure the height of our project matched the 4 foot height of the boards and bam! they worked perfectly! They were a little more rough than regular wood would have been, but it’s not noticeable unless you’re looking up close (like you can see in these pictures!).

Once all the boards were up, I painted it all a second coat, and we were done!

I feel like this adds a new dimension to our bland breakfast nook. Each piece of wood was about $4, the 1x4s were about $20, and the paint was about $30. This whole look cost us about $100!