Board & Batten

About 6 months ago we moved our twins out of their cribs and into twin beds. The last 6 months have been a decorating nightmare for me! I have had the hardest time figuring out how to make a boy/girl twin two-year old room look cute. One of the biggest problem areas was this long blank wall.


It used to be the wall their cribs were up against but putting twin beds on this wall took up too much of the floor space. I came up with another solution for the beds which you'll see in a later post. I already have enough furniture in the room with 2 nightstands, 2 twin beds and a tall dresser so putting furniture along this wall was not an option. After scouring the internet I decided to try Board & Batten and my fantastic hubby willingly went along with it once I showed him pictures of it.

We started by painting the wall about 3/4 high with a glossy white paint.

We went to a hardware store and purchased 4x8 sheet of MDF and had the guys cut them into 2" strips. We also bought a 12' long pre-primed 1x6 for the top border. I layed them all out in the garage and painted away...although you could wait and paint them once they are up on the wall if you wanted. Ignore the 3 wide planks in the picture below. Those didn't work out and we went back to buy the aforementioned 12' 1x6.

My handsome helper mitred the ends of each plank so that the transition from plank to baseboard wouldn't be so awkward. My little guy decided to get an early start on learning 'boy' stuff.

In the process of this project we bought a new (and slightly expensive) toy that we need to use for other projects very soon to justify the purchase of this and the compressor.

Here's a close up detail of the bottom of the plank.

After it's all up on the wall we filled in the nail holes with wood filler, sanded and touched up the paint.

Finished product! I'm sorry the photo angle is so awkward... Remember my unfortunate camera incident? Well, my temporary until I can afford a new lens is a 35-80mm so everything is much closer than it was when we did this project. Picture me up on a bed squishing myself as far as I can into the corner of the room and I still couldn't get the whole wall in one shot!! Hopefully you can get the idea here.

Now the wall appears full without any additional furniture. I love love love it!! I think I'd have B&B or beadboard in almost every room of my house if that wasn't absolutely crazy!!

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