This Wall Needed a Little 'Something'

When we bought our home in 2014 we loved how the dining room flowed into the living room. However, every time I walked thru it I always thought it needed a little 'something'. Well, two rooms shared one very large wall, so a little 'something' became quite a large something. Inspired by a Pinterest post (of course) I stumbled upon the words 'board and batten.' Board and what? I had never heard of these words used together in my life. Well, I was inspired and decided to take on the challenge. Here is the gigantic wall we tackled.

Finished Wall

Most of the ideas I was seeing online involved using MDF. I chose to use 1x2x8 poplar boards, about $2.50 each at Lowes. They are the cheapest ones they carry. We started in the middle of the wall using two vertical boards that went from floor to ceiling. We did this to hide a large crack in the drywall. Smart! That saved me from hiring a drywall guy as that skill is not is not my wheelhouse.

After the 2 vertical pieces were in place we broke out our 6th grade math skills and divided the entire wall length into even sections for the boards to be installed.

I am not one to use a nail gun (that will come later when we redo our master closet) so Daddy Bird was the operator of that. I am more of a table saw gal and was in charge of the wood.

Once the wall was measured and I decided how tall the rail should be, I measured and cut all the boards using my miter saw. I used a quarter round piece of moulding on top of our baseboards so the boards didn't appear to be hanging in mid-air. The vertical boards rested on the moulding.

For the horizontal boards I ended up using three different ones, stacked. I wanted to create a wide enough shelf to hold our family photos that we had printed on very large canvases. 

We used a nail gun to get everything into place, puttied the holes and painted. Also, because we have a warped wall we had to use some caulking along the edges to fill any gaps. Overall, the gigantic wall that needed a little 'something' ended up with a pretty 'BIG' something. We are very happy how it turned out.