I’ve been bitten by the Board and Batten Bug! Not exactly a tutorial

First off I have a disclaimer:  this is not one of those extremely resourceful tutorial posts with to-die-for pics, once again, my camera is broken 🙁 and I’ve been taking pics with my daughters DSi (that’s about to get traded in for a new camera for me, just kidding, just kidding).  This post basically serves as an account of my experience with board and batten, happy reading 😉

I’ve been seeing posts of board and batten everywhere and am such a huge fan of custom mill work in homes… I remember touring the model homes in NC (Drool) and simply wishing I could one day have something that expensive looking in my home.  Then jackpot!!! I came across all of the wonderful tutorials in blogland . . .( I’m pretty sure I read EACH and EVERY ONE).

If it were up to me, I would add b&B to just about every room in the house, but I chose to start small and attempted the hallway. The tutorial that I chose to follow (and the one that best suited my budget) was Melissa’s at 320 Sycamore (one of my favoritest blogs to read!). In her tutorial she showed us how to use the lattice strips that come in a pack of ten found at Lowe’s ( I spent about $8 and used each and every piece, even being thrifty enough to piece some together to make a full strip!).  These strips are not smooth like the ones you find in the molding and trim aisle, but they are a bit cheaper–you just gotta do a lil more work to ’em.  So I enlisted the help of my 7 year old daughter for this, she and I stayed up until midnight last night cutting those bad boys down to size ( we cut our strips to 47″ and my wall height is approx. 93″, I ended up with 14 strips in total) and sanding them to our desired amount of smoothness.

Here are a few of the tools we used, paintable white caulking, liquid nails, sanding blocks, Hershey’s peppermint kisses, yardstick . . . what? Chocolate is most definitely a tool!

We then primed the boards with Krylon spray primer ($2.99), (again this is not a tutorial, I am extremely lazy and try to make short cuts as often as possible)– however, I don’t think this was the best choice, if I were to do it again when I do it again, I will buy the smooth, long sanded and possibly already primed lattice strips for more cash, or use real primer-because even after sanding them, you can still see the roughness of the strips through the paint).

Primed Lattice Strips, the “Batten”

Then because I often get ahead of myself, I forgot to take pics  I went ahead and liquid nailed them to the wall in 15 inch increments and then painted,– AGAIN, when I do this next time, I will paint the strips and the wall first, then attach the lattice to the wall and fill in the cracks, etc . . .

Trying to do this project as cheaply as possible, I bought this paint:

It cost about $15 for a gallon at Home Depot, “America’s Finest” what a crock! buy GOOD paint, this stuff didn’t cut it–five coats later!!!  Lucky me–I will be doing about 5 more coats in the morning, ugh!!!!

The molding I chose to use was white mdf casing at $.85 p/ft and totalled about $15, this worked out great as I cut them in the store, but when I needed to make additional cuts at home it was super easier than cutting real wood with a hand saw. So easy a seven year old can do it! (with my new trusty handsaw and adult supervision of course).

about $8 at Home Depot

Here are some pics of the semi-finished product, I will update with (hopefully) better pics and an accessorized hallway soon! I also hope to add a little more trim to bulk it up a bit, but all-in-all, I spent, less than $45 on my hallway, not bad for small money and big impact!

Please keep in mind, I’ve got a few more coats of paint to do 🙁 Darn that cheap paint!

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