Liv Life: Dining Progress

One thing that I have read and now am experiencing first hand is how much changing a light fixture and adding architectural elements can transform a room!! With our goal of hosting Thanksgiving, finishing the dining room was a top priority. Here is a before picture of our dining room from the MLS listing. While I think the room looks fine it was just not my style and we needed to make our own.

via I had a few ideas, but this started out as a VERY slow process. I absolutely love board and batten and knew this would be the best place in our house to add it. About a month after we moved in I wanted to get started. I was a little ambitious and began measuring the walls and trying to determine out spacing and dimensions for the boards. If you are a blog follower like me, many people have posted different tutorials on tackling this project. I began by wanting 1/4 inch thick boards so I wouldn't have to change my base boards. I started by going to Lowes, Home Depot, and Mills Fleet Farm to realize this was going to be a tough order to fill. So I brought home a couple different sizes to determine what we liked best. We choose to have the boards 1/2 "x 4" x 4' so I began calculating our spacing as suggested over here. Before we began putting up the boards I started painting the lower half of the walls white since it would be easier to paint without the boards. After about 3 coats ( dark brown to white, I highly suggest primer) I called it good since I knew I would give it a couple extra coats once the boards were up.

Next we put up the top horizontal boards. Since we don't have an air gun to nail the boards in we pre-driled holes into the boards and then nailed the boards into the studs. While this was very tedious this went much faster than the vertical boards.

The vertical boards presented their own challenge since the spacing did not always account for a stud. I could tell the husband was getting frustrated because we would nail in the boards and they would pull away from the wall. Since I convinced him to help he asked, "what the blogs say about this issue?" HAHA! Unfortunately every blog has a slightly different variation to this tutorial/process, so we concluded to use liquid nail to help adhere the boards to the wall!

Awe, can't you see the love he had for me while completing this project?

I wish I could say this all happened in a weekend, but unfortunately this project spanned across many weekends and the dining room was a disaster zone. Finally all the boards were up and it was time to caulk and putty the boards to make a seamless look. This is a crucial step and since this was my first major project I learned a lot of what not to do: Take your time! Don't forget to sand and clean all the boards before painting again to get a smooth finish! I wish I could say our results are flawless, but you can seem some of seams, but overall I think it turned out pretty good! Here are a few poor pictures since I have more projects I don't want to spoil :)