Installing Board and Batten Up the Steps

We talk a lot about the Family Room and it’s recent updates here on the blog, but very rarely does the staircase get much airtime. Maybe because whatever happens in the family room generally travels into the foyer and up the steps to the upstairs hall… so the steps don’t generally have a story of their own. Except for today!

If you were with us last week during Blogiversary numero uno, you might have seen the finished project in our Winter Home Tour video if you were looking closely enough. 🙂 Today’s the day for the big unveiling! Well, really just the “how we did it”. Before we go there, though, let’s review… when we bought the house, the staircase looked like this:

And then we painted the family room/foyer/staircase yellow:

Followed by the most recent update… repainting that same space a cool light blue/gray (the color is Cumulus by Behr):

The family room currently looks like this:

And the staircase, like this:

Now do you feel caught up? Awesome, let’s get right into it. We decided that we wanted something to break up all of the color on the staircase, add some interest to the space, and bring in some more of that crisp white color we’re loving on the trim, balusters, and corner cabinet. Because front door is not very window-y (there are just two itty bitty ones at the very top), the staircase can feel a little dark and dingy if we’re not careful. The more light, bright colors we introduce, the cleaner and fresher it feels. That’s what we learned when we painted it blue/gray.

I had been pinning a lot of wainscoting, board and batten, bead board looks that I liked and in the end, that’s the direction we decided to head in. Here are a few of my pins that inspired the project:

You can find the actual sources for each pin here, here, here, here, and here.

Our favorite was the board and batten. We already have bead board in the kitchen and upstairs bath and wanted to stay away from having to figure out tons of angles to make wainscoting boxes that traveled up the steps. Plus, the board and batten felt fresh, modern, and crisp- and there are easy ways to get the look without spending loads of moolah. So the board and batten won. 🙂 To do this project, we used 1×3″ boards for the “board” portion, lattice strips for the “batten”, and just painted the wall behind it to make the whole thing look “built in”. In the end, we couldn’t have been happier with the result:

Here are the materials and tools we used to get the job done:

• Saw or smaller cutting tool (we used a Multitool- something like this that can be a sander, cutter, etc.)
• Nail Gun (this is not necessary- you can do this project with a hammer and nails, but the gun definitely speeds up the process)
• Level (this one’s probably the MVP of the project)
• Drill
• Plumb Bob
• Pencil
• 1×3″s for the board*
• Lattice strips for the batten*
• Liquid Nails
• Wood Putty and Sandpaper
• Paintable caulk (runner up for MVP)
• Paint and painting supplies (brush, roller, etc.)

*I’m not going to mention many measurements in this post because your measurements will be different depending on how big your space is. This is why I didn’t even say how much of each type of wood we bought- yours will be different anyway!

This is how we went about the project:

Step 1: Measure the distance you want your board and batten to cover. That distance will tell you how many 1×3″ pieces to buy. We decided to start ours to the left of the front door, up the steps, around the corner. We chose to only do one wall of the staircase and leave the wall with the railing empty.

We also finished the look by adding a strip on the opposite wall in the upstairs hall.

Step 2: Measure how high you want the board and batten to come off the floor (this is not the angled staircase portion, just the “landings”). Ours ended up being 42 1/2″ from the floor to the top of the board.

Step 3: Measure the height on the angled staircase portion. To find this, we just made two 42 1/2″ marks- one at the top of the steps and one at the bottom- both on the landings, not the steps. Then, we connected those two marks and the height of the staircase portion ended up being 39″ from each step to the top of the board. This might not be the offical way, but it worked for us!

To connect the two markings to find the staircase height, we used a Plumb Bob. Essentially, this device has string wound inside of it. You pour in some chalk powder, shake it around to coat the string, have one person hold one end on the mark at the bottom of the steps and another person hold the other end (the string will unwind from the inside so you can pull it out) at the mark at the top. When the string is tightly stretched between the two marks, have another person pull the string from the middle directly out and let it go. When it snaps back against the wall, it will leave a chalk line- this give you your guide for attaching the top board on the staircase portion of the wall!

Step 4: Cut the 1×3″s to the sizes you need and use a level to make sure things are even before you affix them to the wall. We used liquid nails and, followed by extra long screws to attach them to the wall.

For the points where the angles happen, we figured out a rough angle to cut each adjoining and butted them up to each other. I am SURE there is a professional way to do this and you can probably find a tutorial on YouTube, but a rough guesstimate, some pencil markings, cutting little by little, and caulk to fill the cracks worked just fine for us. Seriously, caulking covers a multitude of sins!

Step 5: Measure how long each lattice strip needs to be and cut all of your non-angled pieces. Make sure to take into account any baseboards you may have!

Step 6: Measure and cut all of the angled lattice strips for the steps. To do this (another non-professional-but-worked-for-us way), we took a piece of lattice and held the end up to the already attached board. Use your level to make sure it’s straight and mark the two spots where it “hits” the top board. Connect the two points on the lattice strip to create a diagonal line. Do the same thing at the bottom, using the baseboard to help determine your marks. *Remember- when you cut the angle, the piece will get shorter, so make sure to take that into account when you’re making your marks!

Step 7: Using your cutting tool, cut along the pencil lines.

Step 8: Attach each lattice strip to the wall. Ours ended up being 36″ apart. To attach each strip, we double checked to make sure it was straight with a level, glued it to the wall with Liquid Nails, and followed up with the nail gun- same process as the boards.

Step 9: Use wood putty to fill all of the nail holes and spaces where boards meet. Sand each spot down to make it all smooth and ready for paint!

At this point in the process, you’ll have a very skeleton-looking version of the finished product. Rest easy, though- you’re in the home stretch!

Step 10: Fill large cracks and spaces with paint-able caulk. As our walls are definitely warped in some places, there were spots where the boards did not lie flush with the wall. No big deal, though- fill those spaces with caulk and once it’s painted, you will never know the difference!

This might have been my favorite part of the project… check out what a difference the caulk makes!

Step 11: PAINT! We used what we had- Ultra White by Behr in Semi Gloss (in most cases, people use something more along the lines of a flat or satin). The finish is a bit shinier than the normal wall paint, but it’s not overbearing like I thought it might be and the gloss adds a little bit of “fancy” to the look.

Step 12: Repaint over any markings on the wall. Every so often, we had accidentally made scratches on the wall in our attempts at sanding, caulking, etc. Just take a small paint brush and use your wall paint color to fix those spots.

Ok, enough with the boring details. Let’s just get to the good stuff- the “after” pictures! And, just to jog your memory (and so you don’t have to scroll all the way to the top again), here is is a little before and after comparison.

Looking up the steps (check out this throwback to our first painting days!)…

And after we re-painted….

This is how it looks today!

At the top of the landing…

The other side of the hall…

And if you turn around and look back down the steps (before)…

And after…

Better, huh? We think so too 🙂 So, how about you? What’s your favorite look out of the three: wainscoting boxes, beadboard, or board and batten? Have any of the three at your own house? Tell us! Better yet, shoot us some pictures… w e’d love to see!