The Nursery Walls Part II: Board and Batten...kinda

Are you excited to see the finished walls?!  And because I forgot to take a non-camera phone photo previously you will also see a sneak peak of our non-DIY window treatments.  You lucky duck.

I absolutely love the fresh, clean and bright feel of this room now.  Do you remember the before?

Nursery Before

To start on this you will want to determine how you want your placement and take precise measurements.  Given my day job contains lots of computer aided drawing and detailing I have our whole house (and yard-to-be) drawn up in AutoCAD...that's normal, right?  Therefore I triple checked the nursery dimensions, updated the drawing, and elevated all my walls to aide in my OCD planaholic personality.  A simple sketch would suffice, too...but why would I just do that?  I later decided to delete the crown moulding - with only 8'-0" ceilings it really limited my options for art sizes, shapes and placement.  Trust me - I did about 10 other elevations playing with art and shelving just to be sure.

Elevation Drawings

We made our trip to Lowe's as my research indicated they had the primed MDF boards at the sizes that best suited our space.  We needed eight 1x3x8's for the vertical (which we would cut exactly in half) and six 1x4x12's for the base and chair rail.  For anyone new to lumber dimensions the width and thickness are NOMINAL sizes.  A 1" thick board is generally 3/4" thick (depending on if it is wood, composite, or MDF).  A 3" wide board is actually 2-1/2" wide and a 4" wide board is actually 3-1/2" wide.  Check out more on that at trusty old Wikipedia: Lumber.

I also picked up: Liquid Nails, caulk, and 1-3/4" long primed finishing nails.  Initally I hoped to use our nail gun, but the longest nail it accomodates is 1-1/4."  In our situation we have the 3/4" thick lumber plus 5/8" thick gypsum board which totals 1.375."  A nail that is 1.25" wouldn't even make it into the studs, and that would be useless.  Note: I was stoked about the primed finishing nails.  I didn't use those when we added trim to thicken up our crown moulding downstairs, so I thought they would be the coolest nails ever for this.  Um, no.  After a few taps with a hammer the primed finish came right off 75% of the nails.  {sad face}

Back when I primed and painting the ceiling, I went ahead and primed the walls and used a coat of the cheaper flat finish ceiling paint as my first coat of white paint where I was installing the batten.  As you increase the sheen level in your paint the price increases as well.  Not that a coat of paint is all that costly, but with the set up and clean up process of painting (the paint trays, the rollers, the brushes) it just made it easy to go ahead this way.

Painting Progress

When making my cuts for the base and chair rail I decided not to overcomplicate things.  With the exception of my one outside corner I butted all my joints together.  Why miter if I don't have to?  If you did not see last week's post about removing base board then check that out here: The Nursery Walls Part I.

Outside corner with mitered edge; inside corner straight - overlapping the perpendicular board

First was the base, second the vertical battens, and last the chair rail.  This is a camera phone photo, so it's a little blurry.  Don't fret - the glider was covered in a canvas crop cloth and plastic drop cloth when all the painting occurred!

And I chose neither of those paint colors! Left: SW6218 Tradewind, Right: SW0019 Festoon Aqua

Now ideally you want to hit studs with your nails...and ideally the duplex outlet isn't DIRECTLY  where you want your center batten...ON ALL FOUR WALLS.  Seriously...shut up.  I just pushed the board I wanted to be centered over and slightly respaced the other boards.  I considered just cutting the board at the outlet, but hey...six one way, half a dozen the other.  Whatever floats your boat.  We hit studs with the base and the chair rail, and then about 30% of our vertical boards.  The rest we are trusting in Liquid Nails and the nails that are just through the drywall. 

Once you have completed attaching all your boards you can caulk away.  Follow the instructions on your caulk to determine how long you need to wait before painting (usually 2 hours).  Since the boards and walls were already primed and the walls already had a coat of paint, I only had one full coat of semi-gloss white paint to do plus a little touch up here and there. 

See...this paint color is kinda in between the other two swatches...SW6477 Tidewater

See that annoying outlet placement?  Oh well.  Speaking of electrical...next week we can talk about updating our old almond colored duplexes and light switches to white ones.  And just like our walls were so much more than paint...our electrical updates ARE MORE THAN JUST A COLOR CHANGE!  I know you are on the edge of your seat in anticipation...

 

Tatertots & Jello / It's Overflowing / DIY Showoff