Thursday, April 28, 2011

Fake Board and Batten

Or how my husband learned to stop worrying and love my the blogosphere's ideas.
Some time ago I had a small fiasco involving exterior paint, paint stripper, and a large mess.  Paint stripper on painted walls is kinda a no no I learned.  I should have busted out the sand paper instead, lesson learned.  I needed something to fix or at least cover the mess I made on the wall between our kitchen and dining area.  I happened to have some wallpaper we'd bought at Home Depot an even longer time ago for like $1.  I put up the wallpaper and my husband cut some chair rail for me to finish it off.  

This is what it looked like for quite a while.  A couple of spots got torn while I was putting it up, but they weren't super noticeable.  The seams got kind of gappy too (that part was a little more noticeable.  When we started getting the house ready to sell, I knew I probably needed to do something else with those walls.  I wasn't too keen on pulling off the wallpaper (remember the whole messed up wall thing?)
After seeing so many versions of faux board and batten wainscoting online I decided it would be a good thing to do for these walls.
We had already installed new baseboards after redoing the floor, we already had some chair rail put up too.  We even had enough left over to continue the chair rail around the other little wall to the kitchen.  After getting our granite counter tops put in, we had a big gap at the top of the half wall (the old tops were sloped by a whole inch!) We got a piece of baseboard trim and installed it upside down underneath the counter to cover the gap and the area where the old, thinner piece of trim used to be.  We bought some inexpensive white screening and some wood corner guard pieces.  My husband manned the saw and cut the pieces for me.  I used liquid nails to attach the screening to the wall over every wallpaper seam.  I dug out the rest of the wallpaper and continued the wallpaper around the small wall (that wall was a mess too, totally unrelated to paint stripper).  My husband installed the chair rail in that section.  I continued with the liquid nailing parts, and then the caulking.  Caulk is definitely your friend when you're working with trim.


gappy

That wasn't even the worst part.






I debated adding more vertical pieces, but decided it was fine the way it was- with pieces over each seam and corner guards over each outside corner.  I primed everything with zinsser primer (I'd read that it was good for sticking to all kinds of surfaces) and then painted it all with a semi-gloss white paint.  I wish I had not used cheap paint (I might have to do another touchup coat at some point, plus the cheap paint took three coats as it was).  Good paint is definitely worth it!  I'm very happy with how it turned out and the reaction to it has been very positive.  Would I have done this if the wall hadn't been messed up?  Probably not, but I think it will be helpful in selling just because it's one less problem and might even be another reason for someone to like our house.

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1 comment:

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