DIY Board & Batten Accent Wall

I have been brainstorming ideas for an accent wall in our informal dining room for months!  I wanted something classy, but fun. So I landed on creating a DIY board and batten accent wall. This project was simple, affordable and completely changed the look of the space!

Supplies:

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• Batten strips: MDF sheet cut into 3inX8ft strips
• Primer
• Paint
• Stud finder
• Tape measure
• Painters tape
• Liquid nails
• Nail Gun/air compressor/nails
• Miter saw or laminate cutter
• Caulk
• 8’ Quarter round (or another edging you prefer)
• Sanding block
• Paper towels

1 Cut MDF sheet into batten strips

We bought two 4’X8’ sheets of MDF at Lowe’s and had an employee cut the sheets down to 3”X8’ strips.  

2 Paint Wall and strips

You will need to paint your wall the color you plan to create your board and batten design.  We chose pure white from Sherwin Williams. I also highly recommend priming and painting your batten strips before you put them on the wall.

3 Determine Design

I chose to do seven vertical batten lines and two horizontal batten lines on our wall.  The horizontal batten lines are 18in from the top and 18in from the bottom.

4 Secure border batten pieces to the wall

Add the border batten pieces along the crown molding, along the baseboard, and along the ends walls.   I used our laminate cutter to cut all batten pieces during this project and it worked out SO well!

5 Spacing

Now comes the hard part.   Determining the spacing between the vertical battens is not something you should do when you are tired and annoyed… believe me, I know from experience 🙂  We first put the middle batten piece on the wall, by finding the center of the wall. Then divided the space to the left of the middle batten by three to get the spacing for the rest of the vertical pieces.  TIP: make sure to measure from the center of the middle batten piece to the center of the end batten pieces. See image below for more details.

6 Secure Vertical battens to the wall

Use liquid nails and painters tape to secure the vertical batten pieces to the wall.  We decided to secure most of the batten pieces with liquid nails and painters tape because most of the battens were not on studs.  This made for easy installation.  I also didn’t have to fill in very many nail holes!

7 Secure horizontal pieces of batten to the wall

These pieces will fit in between each vertical batten.  I wanted these pieces to be 18 inches from the top border batten piece.  To be safe, I measured each space between each of the vertical batten like this:

We then secured them to the wall with liquid nails and painters tape.  I again used our laminate cutter to cut all pieces for this project.  This way I didn’t have to go in and out of our house to use the miter saw.  The laminate cutter really saved time and sanity!

8 Caulk

I decided to caulk every place where the batten pieces met the wall and all nail holes.  This makes the design look more finished.  If you want a closer look at how I did this watch my Instagram Highlight video.

Add border edging

I ended up having to add quarter round to the ends of the wall.  With an older house, you can pretty much bet the walls are not straight.  So by doing this it helped hide the space on the ends and finished off the design.

9 Paint

Paint over all the places you caulked to make sure the entire wall is the same color.  Paint any other places that need touch-ups.

This project was so cheap and easy to do that I am so surprised how much it transformed the space!  It makes our informal dining room seem bigger and fancier 🙂 Now I just need a small table and some chairs to finish off the space 😉

Check out my Instagram highlight story for videos on this tutorial!