Lightening Up the Bedroom (Board and Batten Prep)

I'm thinking of making some changes to the master bedroom. Well, that's a bit of a lie because I've actually  started already.

If you remember, last year we painted the bedroom Benjamin Moore Stormy Monday (after a brief detour to BM Arctic Seal). With orange and white accessories we were pretty happy with the results. But after a year of living with it, I felt like it was still a little too dark.

Before:

Not that I want to repaint the whole room - just half of it. The bottom half. We're going to install board and batten wainscoting. Tom's very excited. (No, he's not.) But he's willing to give it a shot if it makes me happy. We're going for something simple - maybe like this,

Make It & Love It

So this past weekend I painted the lower half of the room bright white. I knew we wouldn't have time to paint AND install the battens in one weekend - plus caulking, puttying, and painting some more - so while Tom was off at his pool tournament I got the painting out of the way.

I used paint and primer in one, but it still took three coats to cover the grey. The nice thing was that the paint colour was the same as the trim, so I only needed to tape off the upper half of the wall and cover the floor.

The room already has chair rail moulding around the room. Honestly, I don't love it. It's too narrow and a bit too ornate.

We will be removing it when we install the wainscoting, but for now I thought it would look better painted. Though, after four coats, there was still grey paint showing through. Grrrr.

When we painted the room the first time, I wanted it all one colour as I thought two colours would chop the room in half and make the ceiling look lower. But the white horizontal line through the middle somehow makes the room appear wider and the height still looks the same. So that's a win.

The baseboard will have to be replaced as well, as the upper edge of it is probably no more than 1/8 of an inch deep - far too thin for battens.

We're not going to be installing chunky ones, somewhere in the range of 1/4 inch, maybe a bit more. We're going to keep the door trim in place and match that depth. Luckily, we have a planer now, so we can customize the boards to whatever thickness we need.

It'll be a week or two before we have time to continue with the project, but so far, so good.