Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Maila's Room - Building the Board & Batten

Ok. This is probably my favorite room in the house so far!! This was definitely a labor of love. And Maila is only 4 so she probably doesn't appreciate how much work I put into this project, but let's be real... while I want Maila to love this room... I also want to love it. Enter BOARD & BATTEN.

When we last saw eachother, Maila's room looked something like this...


I had just added the chair rail around the span on the room...

NOW it looks like this....


Oh my goodness.. It's so pretty and such a difference!! Let me know you how I got there!!


After adding the horizontal chair rail around the entire perimeter of the room... I hopped on over to Lowes and picked up some 1x2 pieces of primed MDF..... (the material I used to the chair rail was a 1x3 primed MDF)


Since I knew I was already going to be painting all of the trim I was planning to put into the room, I wanted to save myself some time and get something already primed.

I measured from the top of the baseboard to the bottom of the chair rail, cut the board to the right size and screwed them into the wall... it looked a little like this...


I ran into a couple of problems while I was doing this throughout the room. So let me help you so if you decide to do this, you won't run into problems too...

The MDF is wider than my baseboard. But I didn't want to have to take out my baseboards, but I didn't want the MDF sticking out awkwardly over the baseboard. My solution was the cut the bottom part of the vertical slats, where they meet the baseboard, at a 45 degree angle so they would kind of give the illusion that they were the same width as the baseboards....

I know that's confusing.. here's a picture!


Above is showing you the 45 degree angled cut on the bottom of the MDF... Below is what it looks like on the wall...


Yes, yes, I could have bought some slimmer trim to do the vertical slats with, but I wanted them to have some weight and add some depth to the room. So this is why I chose this option.

The other problem I ran into was that I ran out of enough MDF to do every single vertical slat in one piece. See below....


It was a simple solution... I just took left over MDF, measured it to size, cut it, and then installed it.



 Here is what it looked like after. Nothing a little spackle, wood filler, and caulk can't hide!!



Here's what it looked like installed throughout the room before it was painted....




I did have to pay attention to where the sockets went in the room. Whenever I went to install the vertical trim and there was a socket, I had to be sure that I could put the cover on the socket and not have the trim in the way. It wasn't hard, just meant that some boards had to be moved over slightly.



After I finished installing ALL of the trim, then came the time consuming part...

CAULKING EVERY SEAM

Ok guys.. if you want your project to look like someone who actually knew what they were doing did it, then all the seams need to be caulked. all of the surfaces need to be sanded. Where the screws went in, they all need to be countersunk and then filled in with wood filler and then sanded again.

All the surfaces need to be smooth and no noticable seams should be showing!! It's a LOT of work, and takes a LOT of time...but if you put in the time in the prep work... the outcome will be totally worth it!!!



xoxo
Hailey

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