Board & Batten

We've been doing a bunch of house projects lately, mostly paining. It's addicting once you start! You see the transformation in one space and it makes you think of all the other spaces you could change. The big project on our list was the dining room, we've been planning it out for a long time and getting up lots of courage to actually tackle it. Painting is one thing but board and batten is a little more permanent. It includes saws and nail guns and that's a little intimidating. 

We started by taping off everything and measuring and then measuring again. We went to the hardware store and priced out supplies, we calculated and planned and borrowed tools. Then we planned a Saturday we could actually execute on all those plans. Christopher was the procurement manager when we went to Home Depot on Friday night. He counted all the tubes of caulk and liquid nails. He watched the worker cut the boards and waved to all the people we saw.

Bright and early the next morning we set to work getting all those boards on the walls. We got the boards (the horizontal pieces) up before Topher's first nap- the compressor and nail gun freaked him out a bit but he was mostly just curious about what the heck was happening to his house. While he napped I measured and Thomas cut the battens (the vertical pieces). We had to measure and number each piece individually since we live in an old house and nothing is straight. When Topher woke up all we had to do was slap them up on the wall. And by slap them up on the wall I mean carefully glue, measure and level each piece before nailing it.

Installing the battens went much more quickly than I expected it to, Thomas watched Topher and I installed all 30 of them in about an hour. I was quite intimidated by the nail gun at first but it wasn't so bad. I didn't even shoot myself in the foot or anything! We managed to get all the caulking done that afternoon too.

We spent the following week painting each night after the baby was in bed. This part seemed to take forever! It was such an intricate process to make sure everything was coated nicely.

Then it was time to try and figure out what color we wanted for the top portion of the room. We had originally wanted grasscloth wallpaper but after pricing it out we decided on paint- much less expensive! It was between Benjamin Moore Twilight (left) or Benjamin Moore Galapagos Turquoise (right).

I really loved the Galapagos Turquoise but in the end it was just a little too green for the vision I had for the room. We went with Twilight and it's perfect! It's such a rich, deep looking blue with just a hint of green in the bright afternoon.

The finishing process on a project like this seems to take the longest time. It was two coats if white plus touch ups, two coats of blue plus touch ups and then making sure everywhere the colors met was perfect. You really see imperfections in such contrasting colors.

The end result could but be more perfect to me. It's almost exactly how I'd imagined it would turn out and has completely transformed the feel of the whole house.  

We've now completely covered all of the yellow walls on the main floor! Next up is probably the stairway but that area has some very interesting issues were going to have to work around. I think we might take a break from home things till after the holidays!