Board and Batten Entry Wall

Oct 17

There’s always a time and place for some decorative wall trim to give your home some character. If you’ve thought about board and batten but were unsure where to begin - look no further!

Here’s what we used:

MDF trim

Paint

Cordless nail gun

Drywall putty

Tape measure

Miter saw

Want to SEE a space in your home designed out just for you before you start your next project? I can help! Tell me about your project, here.

STEP ONE

The most important part of the entire project is measuring. Every wall is a different size so what we did won’t necessarily work for you. But, here’s the basics.

Measure the wall length. Ours is 150.75 inches.
Decide how many openings you want on the wall, this will help you determine the spacing between them. (For reference, ours are 17.5 inches apart and I think that’s the perfect distance.) We ended up with 7 openings, so 8 vertical trim boards.
Measure the width of your trim. Ours were 3.5 inches.
Here’s the math: 150.75 (length of wall) - 28 (width of trim x number vertical trim boards) = 122.75 / 7 (number of openings) = 17.5 (distance between openings)

STEP TWO

Paint the wall.

It’s a lot easier to paint when there isn’t anything on the wall so I was able to get a base coat up before the trim. You could probably paint as many coats as you want before putting up the trim, I was just impatient.

I used the exact same paint that we used for our trim, as I wanted the color to be the same.

STEP THREE

Cut your trim pieces to size and nail in place.

Cut the trim to size for the two outside vertical pieces and nail them in place. Then cut the top vertical piece to size and nail in place. This will give you two starting points.

We then started nailing the vertical pieces in place on the bottom. Since our openings are 17.5 and the trim pieces are 3.5, we measured 21 inches from one piece of trim and marked the beginning of the next.

We then finished by adding the middle horizontal piece and remaining top vertical pieces.