HA! Batten-ing? Whatever!

For the Lower bathroom we decided to go with board and batten. I didn’t want this DIY to get out of hand, but at the same time didn’t want it to look cheap. This is our guest bathroom but being on the main floor gets a lot of attention.

We decided to go with MDF because it was very good priced, came in a large piece, and was the correct thickness. Unfortunately, it was not white so I’m not sure that it was the best choice.  However, we did the entire bathroom with one sheet. To save money and time we also decided to just paint the wall under the boards instead of building it out.

I found some great tutorials and combined a few of them to find the technique we used. However, it was pretty simple. These directions are just to get you started. Also sorry for the lack of photos. We don’t have any photos during the process. However, you should get the idea. 

Directions

1. Nail your trim on the bottom and top. We cut our top and bottom pieces the same at 3.5 inches. Why? Only because we wanted to use one board so we figured the dimensions to fit the entire room. HA! But choose what you think looks good! We started to paint it before we put it up, but then decided that it would be just as easy to paint it on the wall.

2. Cut the pieces to fit between them. We measured often because we live in a very odd old house and everything has different measurements. They were all 2.5 inches wide and mostly 42.5 inches long. We nailed them about 18 inches apart. I say ‘about’ because we did alter the dimensions around things like the sink, corners, and baseboard (heating one). We just wanted to make sure they “looked” good.

3. Prime and Paint. A lot. Because the MDF soaks in a lot we did quite a few coats. I should also mention here that some of you might want to sand. We wanted the more rough look then clean so we decided against it. Plus we were just lazy. LOL

We love how it turned out and it only cost us $24.00 for the one sheet of MDF. We had the paint and nails already. You will see more pictures tomorrow with the finished bathroom post. About time – Right?