Board & Batten & Birthdays

This past weekend, I celebrated my 27th Birthday. And by 27th, I really mean 32nd. Ack. There were lots of little signs that I was getting older, but the biggest one was probably that all I wanted for my Birthday was to spend the weekend potty training and starting on our next big home project! Yeah I know. We are w.i.l.d.

I'll get to the potty training later, but for now, here's an update on our hallway project. We decided to do some Board and Batten and followed mostly what Centsational Girl did with a few changes here and there. I'll try to keep it brief, but here's how we did it...

Step 1: Measure, measure, make a very detailed and scaled drawing on your toddler's yellow construction paper and then measure again. When you are done measuring, bring your detailed plans to your local home improvement store, wonder around for approximately two hours, ask really stupid questions, and come out with a bunch of random stuff that you hope will eventually fit together and look professionally done. Oh, and don't forget to take note of all the measurements that you SHOULD have taken before going to the store.

I headed to home depot with my super detailed drawing during nap time and came home with the following:

1. MDF Boards (I found large 2' x 4' pieces for most of the MDF boards and just had them cut at the store)
1. 2 1/4" x 4' x 1/4" thick for the vertical pieces
2. 4" x 4x 1/2" thick for the horizontal pieces
3. 1" x 3.5" x 8' for door casing molding
2. Dremel (to remove small piece of baseboards)
3. White Primer

Step 2: Take "before" pictures so you can show the contractor what your hallway USED to look like before just in case you aren't the professional DIYer that you dream of being and things go wrong. :)

Step 3: Prep - I spent most of the week before prepping the walls and MDF boards so that we would be ready for the weekend. I did a quick sanding of the MDF boards, gave them two coats of primer (we bought the non-primed boards mostly because I couldn't find the primed ones, panicked, and left the store). I also removed the shelf on the wall, patched the giant holes that we made, and taped off the area where the horizontal pieces would be (so we could prime underneath). I think primed the bottom half of the wall.

The height of our horizontal boards were pretty much determined for us because we had a piece of molding that we needed to meet up with from under our steps (more to come on that later). So, that made that decision for us.

Step 4: After the walls were primed, the first thing we did was to add our tall vertical piece of MDF by our dining room door. Our next home project is to add door casings around our two big doorways, so this was in preparation for that. I broke out our new Dremel, and cut away. Umm yeah. I was nervous.

Step 5: Make sure to lay your long MDF board in the hallway so that your no-pants-wearing toddler can practice gymnastics.

Step 6: Once we figured out how to use our nail gun and compressor (ugh...that's a long story), we nailed up our tall MDF board that will eventually be part of our door casing. Oh, and write this down. Don't forget to nail it over top of your painters tape and realize it later. Doh! ::: sigh :::

Step 7: Most of the tutorials I found online all said to start with the top/horizontal pieces first. So we threw those babies up using our handy dandy level and by Saturday night, we had only gotten this far. We had underestimated the kids interest in our little DIY project so we retired all the power tools when the Squishy no longer wanted to hang out in his jumpy chair thingy ma-bob.

Step 8: The one thing we could do during nap time was use our new electric saw and at least get as ready as we could be for the next chance we got to use the nail gun. We had to meet up with our existing baseboard which are rounded at the top. Seeing that we didn't want to mess up our house too bad, we decided to just angle the bottom of the vertical MDF boards to better meet the baseboards. Once we did that, we marked the top cuts (it really helps if you number both the boards and the wall because SOMETHING was not level in our house so each board was a little bit different).

Step 9: Breath a sigh of relief because you have made some good progress. Then curse because you realize you have the entire other side of the hallway to do and THAT's the tricky side. Ugh.

You know how I mentioned the piece of molding we had to meet up with that pretty much determined the height of our board and batten? Yeah, here's that baby. The right side of this picture shows the railing and molding that leads up our steps. Of course we realize AFTER we have purchased, primed and cut the horizontal pieces that they are a different thickness then your original molding. Well, we tried our best to match it up, so we cut an angle on the horizontal piece and figured we would just caulk any gaps. Not great, but not terrible.

Step 10: After putting up the vertical pieces on that side of the wall (we were trying to move at a faster pace because the kids were actually cooperating so no pictures for that step), I patched up the nail holes and broke out the caulk gun and that made a huge difference.

Step 11: Celebrate because your first big home project involving power tools has resulted in zero trips to the emergency room, and one sweet new hallway. Keep in mind we still have to add two more pieces of molding (to finish the look) and actually paint since everything is still only primed.

Before:

After:

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I'm sure there is a bunch that I am forgetting, but overall I am really happy with how far we made it. Not too bad for potty training all weekend as well. More to come when we are all finished!

Oh yeah, the last step is the most important...

Step 12: Smother your baby Squishy with hugs and kisses because you had a great Birthday weekend.