I love the way board and batten walls dress up a room. They look so classic and work well with so many home decor styles.
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If you’ve been on the blog before you know I’m all about saving money and doing things myself wherever I can.
I’ve seen other board and batten tutorials before and decided this was a project that was well within my capacity so I decided to go for it.
My DIY Board and Batten tutorial is different from other tutorials I’ve seen out there in a couple of different ways.
This DIY Board and Batten tutorial is a great project you can easily complete in a weekend if you’re looking for a cheap but cute way to protect your walls and add character to a boring room without undergoing a huge renovation.
I think the materials cost me a total of $40 when all was said and done.
You can’t beat that, am I right?
Why I’m doing A Board & Batten Laundry Room Makeover
About a week ago I added a DIY Farmhouse Barn Door Pet Gate to our laundry room where Oliver sleeps.
I talked about how Oliver has been sleeping in the laundry room at night since it’s cold outside right now.
What I didn’t talk about is how Oliver has gotten into the very naughty habit of eating the walls of our laundry room.
Last week I spackled our laundry room walls and the very same day Oliver started eating it again.
And that was not the first patch job I’ve had to do in there.
Some of you might not know this but pigs are very intelligent.
Similarly to other smart animals like Border Collies, they need mental stimulation to keep them from becoming destructive.
Even then they have their moments and act out because well what else does a piggy do?
It’s really not their fault.
It’s just in a pig’s nature to be curious and root around in anything they can get their snouts on.
That’s why anybody with a pet pig has some sort of securely enforced enclosure or pen for their pig to play and nap in.
They really can’t be trusted to free roam like a dog can.
So although Oliver is enclosed in our laundry room at night he still managed to get into mischief and knawed several holes in our walls.
Needless to say, I finally decided I needed a more permanent solution so I wasn’t having to spackle every other day.
Hence the reason I decided to do a small farmhouse laundry room makeover.
If you look up pet pig enclosures on Pinterest you’ll see a lot of interesting options.
People who have put up plywood boards on their walls or created some sort of wooden enclosure in their living room.
Let’s be honest here people, that’s not very pretty.
I had to create some sort of barrier so Oliver couldn’t continue to eat our walls but I didn’t want to resort to simply nailing plywood to the walls.
I wanted it to be cute.
But I’m always on the hunt for hacks to do projects as cheaply as possible.
Ideally without sacrificing aesthetics in the process.
As you can see there isn’t much to our laundry room.
It’s pretty much a room with a washer and dryer, we don’t even have any shelves, cupboards or tables.
After a little Pinterest search for inspiration, I decided on doing a little DIY board and batten wall.
A lot of the other board and batten walls I have seen go all the way up from the floor to ceiling.
Like I mentioned the whole purpose of this DIY Board and Batten laundry room makeover is to protect the walls from Oliver’s teeth and tusks.
So this DIY Board and Batten wall require plywood to cover the actual wall.
Whereas most other DIY board and batten walls I’ve seen uses a few pieces of trim.
No plywood required.
That option is great and I would have used that method but like I said I needed a cute way to protect the walls from getting damaged.
Using plywood is slightly more expensive than the other method.
However, this is a great alternative if you also are looking for a creative and inexpensive way to protect your walls.
Say if you have a lot of animals or small children who like to draw on things their not supposed to.
Since Oliver is only about a foot and a half tall I didn’t need to cover the whole wall from floor to ceiling.
So it does save money needing less material. About enough plywood to cover only the first 2 to 4 feet
DIY Board & Batten Wall
After reading a few other tutorials the standard spacing for a full floor to ceiling board and batten wall seemed to be 16 inches.
I tested the 16 inch spacing a little on the walls. Ultimately I decided since I was doing wainscoting 16 inches was a little further than I liked.
Finally landing on 14 inches.
Honestly, I recommend playing around with the spacing yourself. See what looks right to you in your own space. But 14 inches is what mine are spaced at.
Like I mentioned before Oliver is only about a foot and a half tall. So I decided 2′ by 4′ plywood sheets would work perfectly for the laundry room.
I contemplated going higher. However, plywood sheets generally come in 1 x something feet 2 x something and 4 x something.
In my opinion, the 1 x something was too short and Ollie could likely still reach the top of the uncovered wall at that point.
On the other hand, the 4 x something was too high.
It looked funky to me and I’m lazy and didn’t want to cut each sheet down a foot.
Not to mention it would be a waste of plywood and more expensive.
Again decide what’s best for you but I used 4 – 2 x 4 plywood sheets.
You’ll need to measure all the walls in your room to figure out how many sheets you’ll need yourself.
Keep in mind if you can have the people at The Home Depot to cut the sheets down to size for you if it’s an uneven number.
Which most likely it will be.
I’ll be honest I was only concerned with covering the parts of the wall that Oliver can access.
I didn’t see the need in doing a DIY board and batten wall on the wall the washer and dryer were because he can’t eat those ones and no one can see back there anyway.
So I stopped the board and batten just a little behind the dryer where the edge of it began.
If you decide to do this it also saves you a little dough.
So once you’ve figured out how many sheets of plywood you need you’ll have the board part down.
Now for the batten part.
It’s pretty standard to use 1 x 2 boards for this part. These are pretty inexpensive as lumber goes I believe I paid $1.48 for each of my 1 x 2 x 6 boards.
To determine how many you’ll need depends on a couple things.
One, the length of each wall your covering.
Two, how height up you’re going with your DIY board and batten wainscoting wall.
And three, the width you’ve decided on spacing your board and batten wall.
The 1 x 2 boards I used are 8 feet tall or 96 inches tall and really only 1 1/2″ wide.
The amount of wall I was covering was about 176″ in width total gove or take.
And I was doing my spacing at 14″ apart, at a height of 2 feet.
I decided since the 1 x 2 boards were so cheap and I’d likely be adding a shelf along the wall later, I would use the 1 x 2 boards, for the top trim.
Most other wainscoting uses a slightly larger trim than used for the batten but smaller than the bottom trim.
However, it’s cheaper to use the 1 x 2 trim.
If you plan to build a shelf against this wall like me you won’t see much of the top trim anyway. So I’d recommend using the 1 x 2 boards like I did.
All of this taken into consideration I bought 5 – 1 x 2 x 8 boards.
The next step is to cut your plywood to length if you haven’t already.
As you can see I have that weird little corner that I had to wrap my plywood around so I had to make a few cuts to fit that.
Try to make your cuts as straight as possible.
Assuming your walls aren’t 4 feet wide you’ll need to add another sheet of plywood next to another.
You want to try and line them up as much as possible.
Don’t worry about it too much it’s not perfect though. We’re going to go back through and fill in the gaps later.
To attach your plywood to your walls you don’t need a heavy-duty nailer since the plywood is pretty thin.
I used my Ryobi Cordless Brad Nailer to nail my plywood to my walls.
You can also use a finish nailer if you have one.
I don’t have a finish nailer, but I’ve used my Brad nailer for a lot of projects in the past. Including my DIY Floating Shelves for my Vinyl Record Gallery Wall.
If you’ve been thinking about buying a brad nailer I highly recommend the Ryobi Cordless Brad Nailer it works great.
It’s affordable like all Ryobi tools.
And Brad Nailers are a great versatile tool to have in your power tool collection.
Plus, if you haven’t used cordless tools in the past you’ll fall in love with them the first time you try them.
However, if you don’t have a brad nailer of a finish nailer and buying one isn’t quite in the budget you can nail in the plywood manually.
It will just take a bit longer.
Next, you’ll need to cut your 1 x 2 boards. I cut each of mine 2 feet long since that’s how tall my plywood wall is.
And I used 3 out of my 5 1 x 2’s leaving the other 2 for the top trim.
You’ll mark your first 1 x 2 and place the edge of it along your mark. Be sure to check each one is level.
Then nail it in place.
You’ll make your next mark after each 1 x 2 you last nailed in.
Starting at the edge of the previous 1 x 2.
The reason you don’t measure and mark your spaces every 14 inches before nailing your batten boards is that then the spacing will not end up evenly spaced 14 inches apart.
Because you wouldn’t have accounted for the 1 1/2″ in width.
However, if you would like to mark your spaces all at once you can.
You’ll just have to measure and mark an additional 1 1/2″ mark from your first one.
This seems like more work to me so I marked as I went along.
After that is done you can add the trim to the top.
Quick Tip: I recommend labeling your top trim you cut it. That way you can easily figure out which length of cut trim goes on which wall.
You can see in the picture above how I labeled my top trim with A B C D and E, I did the same thing to each wall on the plywood.
Next, we’ll want to fill in the spaces where plywood sheets meet and wherever nail holes are.
This is so that when we paint over everything it all looks uniform and clean.
So the batten definition really pops in contrast.
Use nail hole filler or spackle to this. Just be sure to let it dry and then sand it smooth with a sanding block.
Finally, all that’s left is to paint.
That’s pretty straightforward so no instructions needed.
And you’re done!
There you have it a cheap and easy way to make a DIY Board and Batten Wall.
Now your walls are protected from pets kids or any kind of damage.
It’s also pretty, it dresses up your wall making them look more high end but you didn’t have to break the bank to do it either.
What do you guys think? Not bad for a weekend project and a $40 investment.
The laundry room isn’t anything to gawk at yet but it definitely looks better than it did before I think.
I hope you enjoyed week 1 of my Farmhouse Laundry Room Makeover!
I haven’t completely decided what I’ll be doing next in this room but I’m leaning towards adding some shelving that way I’m not piling crap on top of my washer and dryer anymore, but we shall see.
Until next week!!!
Love you guys, and thank you so much for stopping by the blog today!!
