For our guest bedroom, I wanted to add a beautiful DIY accent wall that wouldn’t cost much and wouldn’t require much work. One of the easiest ways to make your home appear custom is by adding wood trim on your walls.
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How to Create a Board and Batten Accent Wall
For the guest room, I decided to do a wood trim accent wall with a rectangle or grid pattern on the wall. Since my walls aren’t very textured, all I needed to add to the wall was 3 X 1 wood trim pieces to create the look. To decide how many boxes you want and how large you want them, you can use tape and start calculating using the width and height of your wall. When making your calculations, keep in mind each piece of wood will be 2.5 inches wide (3 X 1’s are actually 2.5 feet wide… don’t ask me why).
Our wall is about 10.5 feet and we created a 4 X 3 rectangle grid, so we had three rows of four rectangles. You’ll also want to consider where all the trim pieces will be at the end of the project and make sure your bed or other objects in the room will line up where you want them to. This might help you determine how big you want the rectangles/squares.
Before you start nailing the wood trim to the wall, you’ll want to do two important things. First, use a stud finder and mark where your studs are so you can try to get as many of the trim pieces into the studs as possible to make everything secure. Second, you’ll want to paint the entire accent wall BEFORE you place the trim on. You will still have to do a second coat later, but doing the first when the trim is off will save you a lot of time and give you a cleaner look in the end. Since we were doing the same white color as the wall, I did not paint our wall beforehand.
You will also want to paint all the trim pieces before they are nailed to the wall. I forgot this step on this project and I paid for it in time and tedious painting later on. By painting the trim beforehand, you paint the sides with a roller easily and quickly with no brush strokes. Once they are on the wall they are an edge that meets the wall and you will have to use a brush and will make strokes on the wall with every brush stroke. Just trust me and paint one coat of paint on the trim before nailing it.
You can buy wood trim that is already primed with white paint. It is a little more expensive but this helps prevent having to paint several coats of paint to cover the wood. I always buy the primed wood to make things easier, especially for this project where I was painting the wood white.
Once the trim and wall are painted with their first two coats, it's time to nail the trim. Use an electric nail gun with brad nails to secure the trim. You can slant the angle of the gun so the nails enter more slanted and therefore secure more into the wall. Some people use liquid nail glue in addition to nails but this is not necessary and will ruin your wall if you ever want to take the trim off in the future. Brad nails are plenty secure enough. You will want to nail enough for the trim to be secure but also make sure you are staying in a neat line and still only nailing sparingly because all these holes will need to be filled later on.
We nailed the border pieces first, the far left and right vertical pieces then the piece that would run across the entire top. Usually, your wall will be too large for it to only require one horizontal piece at the top so you will most likely need to piece together two horizontal pieces like we did (the part where they meet will be filled later). After we secured the border, we nailed the three vertical pieces that reach from the top horizontal trim piece to the baseboard.
Then, we cut and nailed all the smaller horizontal pieces to create the two horizontal lines that create the rows lines. Throughout this entire step of nailing, you will want to be using a leveler to ensure all your pieces are not slanted. You should also check along the way that your boxes are the same size in case you start making measuring mistakes.
The next part of the project is what will make or break your accent wall into looking like a professional custom wall or a janky DIY project. It’s the filling, sanding and caulking step. First, you will want to find all the holes you just made with the nails and fill them with spackle.
You’ll use a spackle putty knife tool to apply it and scrape excess off but I also use a baby wipe or paper towel to wipe any excess spackle off as well. You’ll wait for the sparkle to dry (there is sparkle that changes color when it is dry) and then use fine sandpaper to sand on and around each hole you filled to make the area even and smooth with the wood trim surface. 220 grit sandpaper is the finest grit so you can use something a little lower than 220.
Then, you will want to caulk between each edge of wood that meets the wall. For this project that means quite alot of caulking. Not only do the border pieces of trim need to be caulked where they meet the ceiling and adjacent walls, but each square will need to be caulked on all four inside edges. Here is a video to show you how to caulk. For this project, I used baby wipes to wipe the excess caulking off instead of my finger, water and paper towels like I usually do. If you are willing to waste a whole bag of baby wipes, I do think it was more convenient to use them, less messy and less strain on my finger!
In addition, you will need to use wood filler where pieces of wood trim meet other pieces of wood trim. This will be where the two top horizontal pieces meet and where the smaller horizontal pieces meet the vertical pieces of trim and create crosses. After the wood filler dries, you will sand these spots down as well.
After all the holes and wood filler are sanded, you will need to wipe off the excess sand with a rag. I also used a soft bristle on my cordless vacuum to get all the sand debris off the wall.
Once the wall is clean and dry, it’s finally time to paint! But first, you’ll need to tape off the edges of the border so you don’t get paint on the side walls You already had painted a coat on the trim so now you are just painting to cover up the holes and gaps in wood that you just sanded. This however needs to be your neatest painting since it’s the last coat that will show the most.
Use a high-quality smaller roller that is labeled for smooth or mostly smooth surfaces. Paint the face of the trim pieces with the roller.
Then, you can use an angled small brush to paint each edge of the trim where you caulked. After this is dry, you can use a roller to then paint inside each square and cover the paint strokes you made by the edges.
The face of the trim pieces might need a third coat of paint if you can still see where the nail holes were. Throughout this process make sure you read the paint can to know what the re-coat and final dry time for your particular paint is.
I use Frog painter's tape and I rip it off as soon as I’m done painting while the paint is still wet. Then, I use a wet paper towel to wipe off any small paint spots that might be on the walls.
Once the tape is off, sit back and enjoy your beautiful accent wall!!!! Wait for it to dry completely before putting any furniture next to it. I hope this helps you DIY your next home project! See my other articles to check out other DIY ideas.
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