Board and Batten- Bedroom

My middle child makes me laugh, all the time. There’s something about her demeanor that is sweet and caring yet witty and sarcastic, and the combination is amazing to me.

Take her room style, for example. She went from wanting a “fluffy” room 2.5 years ago (fuzzy pillows, rug, soft turquoise, pink, and silver accents); to wanting a bright teal accent wall 4 months ago with LED lights around the ceiling; to now wanting a “farmhouse” room. Those are quite the extremes.

Well, my budget, time, and patience can’t be handling all these changes (I had JUST painted this wall in September)… but I didn’t want to completely shoot down her ideas. (She wants to be an interior decorator when she grows up, after all). She had already spent some of her allowance money on cute farmhouse stuff, so I could tell she’s a little more invested in this new theme. I decided to compromise and try to tie together the teal and farmhouse stuff, LED lights and all!

But, how is one to make this bright teal into a farmhouse theme? I went to my loyal Google.com to find some ideas. I found some great thoughts and pieced together some ideas to form one… board and batten (like we did in the kitchen), painted teal on the bottom half, and vinyl stickers (in arrow patterns) on the top half!

Amazon had a great deal on vinyl stickers ($15 total). I went to Home Depot and purchased two 8-foot 1x4s ($6 each), plus the thin pre-cut 4 foot wood pieces that we used for the battens in the kitchen. (In case you didn’t read the kitchen blog, these boards are thin enough that they rest on the baseboards without going over them. Normal 1x4s would have been too thick for the baseboards).

These boards had gone up in price since we did our kitchen… from $4 each to $6 each! I purchased 6 of them, so the total was $36.

The math was surprisingly tricky, figuring out where to put each board… and I used to teach math! Let’s just say that a lot of drawings, erasing and calculators were used. I’ll explain what I did, but if you hate math… just skip this next paragraph. 😉

The whole wall was 154 inches. I planned to put a board on each end (and they were 3.5 inches thick). That was 7 of the 154 inches of wall taken up (so, 147 in. left). The other 4 boards would take up 14 inches of the wall with their thickness (3.5×4). That would leave 133 inches of wall space left to split up (147-14). There would be 5 spaces of wall between the 6 boards, so I divided 133 by 5, and got 26.6 inches. That means that between each board, there should be 26.6 inches of wall space. Whew! I positioned the boards in place and marked where their corners would land.

I went ahead and hung the horizontal 1×4. This was easy; just required two people, a level, and a nail gun. Then, I nailed in the boards in their marked positions.

I cut the second 1×4 to size. I also painted the two boards that would be going on the edges of the walls… I figured they’d be easier to paint off the wall rather than on, so teal paint didn’t get on the gray side walls. I painted the rest of the boards while I waited for Stephen to get off a conference call to help me. 😉

Then, we hung the rest!

Didn’t I say I didn’t want to repaint the wall? I basically ended up doing it anyways… the paint color was just slightly off from the original, and I felt like it was needed. Luckily, it was just one coat.

The vinyl came the next day, and it was very easy to install. The stickers come on sticky plastic paper. You cut the stickers off in sections, stick them to where you want them on the wall (they’re sticky enough to stay in place but not too sticky that you can’t move them), and then rub the plastic so that the vinyl sticks to the wall.

There you have it- an $80 room update ($12 for the two 1x4s, $36 for the battens, $15 for the vinyl, and $17 for the paint). She may be starting a new theme- what should we call it? Maybe funny farm… or uber-modern farmhouse… or maybe just a big farm-ISH! Either way, it’s purely my daughter’s liking… for now!

Check back to see some other farmhouse room accents, many which we are making ourselves!