Board and Batten Bedroom

Today I want to do a post about the changes I made in my son's bedroom last summer. When we moved into this house years ago, his room had wall paneling on the bottom part of the wall with a chair rail above it. I liked the paneling because it was off white but had some green tinting on it that made it more interesting than your typical brown paneling.




I had already changed the wall color to a bluish green but the paneling was quite beat up and really needed to go. Instead of pulling it out completely I decided to make it into a board and batten wall.









I removed the chair rail and then filled in all the lines of the paneling using joint compound. I don't know if that was really the best product to use but it worked and I had it on hand so I went with it. I spread it in any irregularities on the paneling, sanded it after it dried and then did another application. Some areas needed more applications.



All that sanding made a big mess so if you decide to do something like this be prepared for that. This is the top of the dresser I had sitting in the middle of the room. :)










I went to Home Depot and bought the cheapest slats I could find. I don't remember what they were called but the wood is really rough and unfinished. If you use them, make sure to buy plenty because some of them will be split or warped and therefore, unusable. I cut them to length, sanded and then painted all the slats. I painted the paneling and added a floor board that had previously not existed and then we were ready to put the slats on.


After the slats were in place I put a new chair rail on top. I wanted squared off edges like the slats for both the floor board and the chair rail. In placing the slats I wasn't terribly particular. I worked around the outlets and then worked toward the corners. If it looked better to have the slats moved off an inch or two I did it. That room has some odd wall spaces so sticking to an exact measurement could have looked odd. As you can see in a picture above, the old paneling had corner pieces to hide what the paneling looked like in the corners. It wasn't pretty without it so I made sure that each corner had a batten to hide the unpretty. As I added the floor board (which would have been soooo much easier if I'd done it before the new carpet went in) I discovered that the room was not remotely level plus there were oddities in the height of the paneling which had been hidden by the chair rail. If I'd put it in level the floor board would have gone up the wall quite literally so I had to do some adapting to make it look level.


And just for fun I added a colored border to the closet doors.











I said at the top of the post that this is my son's room and so it is but my daughter lived in it for a few months before going back to college and before my son came home again. So this picture is an "after" for when my daughter moved in and is thus more girly than it is at present. I don't have a picture of how it looks now and can't take one for two reasons. One, because my camera battery charger is missing in action and no where to be found and two, because my son lives in there now. Yeah, it isn't looking quite so neat and tidy for a picture even if my camera were usable. :) (Sorry to tell on you son but I do speak truth.) In any case, I was very happy with how the walls turned out. 

I'm linking up to Frugal Friday