DIY Board and Batten- How to Add Modern Wall Treatment- Project Whim

This small little hallway has been transformed multiple times, but I’m so happy to share that it is finally finished! It all began 4 months ago when I came up with the idea to paint the hallway walls to give it some personality. I painted the walls half black and then realized that I wanted something more. We planned to do some sort of wall treatment but realized we had to focus on the floors first. The reason for this is because if we ever ended up ripping up the linoleum floors, you would have to remove the baseboards. Removal of the baseboards are a lot easier when there isn’t an existing wall treatment on the walls. So before we started adding our DIY Board and Batten, we began by renovating this hallway by removing the old Linoleum floors and laying tile ourselves. Check out my blog post and step by step tutorial on How to Tile a Floor Like a Pro . Once the floors were done we chose to add Board and Batten to the walls. This blog post is how we added DIY Modern Board and Batten to our hallways walls.

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First let’s take a look at the stages this hallway has gone through.

Here is the BEFORE

I tried so hard to cover up those ugly linoleum floors by adding lots of rugs.

Then I painted half of the walls black…

Then we decided to wait on the walls and update the floors first. You can read my blog post on How to Tile a Floor Like a Pro for a more detailed tutorial on that.

Now it was time to do something with the walls and get this space finished.

Materials You Need

You will need 1/8″ boards to cover the walls. Then you will need to decide on what type of batten to attach to the boards. This is the fun part. You can find all different kinds of options for your trim pieces. I wanted our Board and Batten to look modern and minimal. The board and batten would run 2/3 height up the wall. I went with a thinner board for the vertical pieces and then a slightly larger size for the horizontal trim piece at the top. We used 1/8″x 1 1/2″ boards for the batten and then 1/2″x 2 1/2″ boards for the trim at the top.

How to Add your Board and Batten

We measured our walls to figure out how many boards we would need and where we wanted the seams to go. You want to make sure you are able to hide the seams on larger walls with your trim pieces. Because our hallways had so many tiny sections of wall, there were a lot of cuts to be made. Once we had our height and width measurements we used a Chalk Line and a Circular Saw to cut our boards. We then used our handy dandy Electric Nail Gun to attach the boards to the wall. We used the same system for our batten and trim pieces. To attach those we held them up where they needed to go. Made sure they were level and then nailed them into the boards.

How to apply board and batten to your walls

step by step tutorial on how to put board and batten on your walls

How to Clean Up Your Edges

After you have all your board and batten up on the walls, it is time to clean up those edges and seams. On Instagram I share in my saved highlight “Hallway Update” how I used caulking to do this. You will want to run a thin bead of caulk down each seam. This is a huge game changer, don’t skip this step. Tip: If you come across a seam or space that is pretty large, don’t waste all your caulking by trying to fill the large gaps. Use toilet paper and a 6 in 1 painters tool to fill in the large gaps. This allows you to use less caulking and get a more solid fill.

Painting your Board and Batten

Once those were up it was time to paint. I had the hardest time finding a paint color. My comfort colors are black and white, but I really wanted a color in this hallway. Particularly a green color. After a lot of trial and error I came across the brand new green color from Magnolia called 1905. It was the perfect color, dark and moody and modern. When it comes to painting your board and batten I highly recommend using a brush to cut in all the corners and edges and then taking a finishing roller for the larger middle sections. This technique give you a smooth and more even finish. This is also the technique we used when we Painted Kitchen Cabinets.