I jumped on the board and batten bandwagon.  Only, unlike all those other girls, I sat back and watched while the men in the family did the work.  My hero, Kimba, got a wet saw for mother’s day. I mean, you would think her husband could at least dry the thing off for her. I got a finished office and all I had to do was paint.  Who’s laughing now?  You know how some people’s love language is like touch and talking and junk?  Mine is fixing up the house.

This is not a tutorial post. Karla, Kimba, AnNicole, and Sarah have already done the hard work for us of writing in detail about their projects.  I read each of their posts a few times before we decided what to do. But I will give you the short version of how we did it.

First, I picked a height where I wanted my b&b to end.  It can be high or low, just don’t cut the room in half because that might look funny.  it’s hard to tell in this photo but mine is about 2/3 up the room.  I painted the top 1/3 an olive color called Village Square.

Then I painted the bottom 2/3 a semigloss white color.  What a weird experience to paint a wall all shiny.  I felt like I was turning my office into a hospital, or a mac store, or one of those eyeglass commercials where everyone is wearing white because it’s the future and clearly, in the future we will only wear white.

Then I had to wait 2 weeks to do anything else because I was having a slipcover party and my man was out of town.  So of course, because of my great sickness, I had to somewhat accessorize the board and battenless office so it wouldn’t feel naked.

Then finally, last weekend, we spent 2 hours at Home Depot.  We went with all our measurements and our goal was to not have to cut anything ourselves at home.  So, we bought three 12 foot, 6 inch wide preprimed MDF boards and measured them in the store and had them cut to the right size.

And, if were were more lazy than cheap, we could have bought 2 inch wide MDF boards for the vertical strips and just had them cut to the right length.  Turns out that we are both cheap and lazy.  So, we grabbed one 4×8? sheet of non primed MDF and had the Home Depot man cut it into strips for us while we high fived each other.  We saved about $80 by slicing up one sheet of MDF instead of buying already cut 2 inch strips.

I paid my son and his friend $5 to paint the strips because again, cheap and lazy I am.

Then my man put everything into place while I took a Mother’s Day nap and read a book.  Meanwhile, Kimba was probably toiling away with her new wet saw.

By the way, where the boards meet the baseboard, we just left it as is, no tapering, no special treatment.  Sorry no photo, but you can imagine.

This was a super easy project {says the girl who didn’t do the work}.  However, I did do all the painting and measurements.  We spent about $150 and that includes a new toy for my husband–the nail gun.  My husband got all the wood on the walls in about an hour or so and then he caulked and we both painted a final coat.  I think we’ll add a shelf on the top in the future but for now, I’m thrilled.

When I was getting ready to do our board and batten, I scoured the internet looking for photos for inspiration.  Do you have a board and batten room you’ve written about?  Link up, I’d love to see it.