Like most dining rooms, ours is visible as soon as you enter our house and said of us living here, "we are very boring people, come on in." We had spent all of our fortunes on the kitchen so I knew I'd have to find some way to add interest to the room on my own. Enter in: board and batten. I followed the awesome tutorial on a favorite blog, Centsational Girl, and am fairly happy with the results. I went blog hopping and read a few different tutorials about this project, and am seriously so thankful for all teh help/inspiration I get from others sharing their skills. I did find that most lucky people had the lovely smooth texture we had in Chicago (the kind I would now kill for) but for some reason, Texans love their thick texture and oak cabinets to boot. Soooo, I couldn't just paint the wall a glossy white, I had to cover it up with 4' X 8' dry erase panels. I also wanted to add a picture ledge all the way around for display.
BEFORE:
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AFTER:
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| My favorite part of this oh so elegent dining room is the air filter/conditioner grill smack dab in the middle of the wall and straight ahead for all who enters to see. The paneling does a pretty good job of hiding it though. |
BEFORE:
AFTER:
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| If you look close enough (don't), you'll see that the boards are not spaced evenly. Some are 12" apart and some are 15" apart! I did this to save myself the headache of cutting around the outlet and also to cover up the mistake I made after cutting the outlet box hole too big. I also wanted a 'board' in each corner. |
BEFORE:
AFTER:
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| The other little thing I did to save myself lots of time and cash was to use very thin pieces of wood for the batten portion. If I had used the suggested 1/4" thick batten (which look I actually prefer), I would have had to rip out my baseboards and used thicker wood so the batten wouldn't hang over the edge of the base. If I had to do it over, I would have followed the voices and done it the suggested way. |
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| I applied this stencil with the same color paint in a high gloss version (Home Depot added the gloss to the Behr paint for free) on this side only to discover that I don't love it and think it belongs in my grandma's dining room (if I had one). Still working on this... |
What does one do when one has extra material lying around and still has a few weeks before the nail gun owner comes a knockin'? That's right, they board and batten anything they can get their hands on. I still had about Dennis Prager podcasts to catch up on anyway.
THE HALLWAY:
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| This little wall greets those coming in directly from the garage door and was the spot where all the backpacks/lunch bags/shoes/other crap ended up. Now it's just the shoes that end up on the floor, even though the shoe basket is 6 inches away. |
OTHER SIDE OF HALLWAY:
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| I wanted to put a picture rail up here also but not only is this hallway narrow (I didn't want to constantly bump into the picures) but it's on the 'garage wall' so every time the garage door slams, I just knew stuff would be falling off the rail. |
