Do It Yourself : Unique Home Office with Dark Accent Ceiling and Board & Batten

We painted the ceiling teal?!? That sounds insane right. I felt insane standing there in the Sherwin Williams holding up a color swatch card in the darkest shade of teal that I have ever seen. Cascades by Sherwin Williams – its a beautiful, stunningly dark teal – green and we were about roll it on our CEILING.

We wanted to do something really unique for Andrew’s office. So we decided to take a big risk and try something new. Teal is so far outside of my white + greys comfort zone, but I knew once we got it all put together it was going to really elevate this small space.

We found this inspiration picture on Pinterest and fell in love with it.

We got to work on this quickly because we knew the board and batten would take us a little longer than a typical painting project. We used 1 in x 4 in Primed MDF for the boards and 1 in x 2 in  for the battens and decided to remove the baseboards around the room and do them in MDF as well so that everything was the same width.

If you don’t have a miter saw (neither do we) here’s a quick video on how to cute battens with a multi-tool!

Multi-Tool Hack

We painted the ceiling first because we didn’t want to worry about getting the dark ceiling paint on the board and batten. This worked out really well because it allowed us to paint the ceiling without worrying about getting it on the top 3 inches of the wall because we knew that would be covered up by boards. We used Sherwin Williams Pro Mar 200 in Flat. They told us at Sherwin Williams that this was the only line of paint that they could make Cascades in as a flat finish. I’m not exactly sure why.

We used the same method to do the board and batten master accent wall project.

What To Do:

1. Paint the ceiling
2. Measure out the spaces between your battens
   • The math we did
     • Length of wall / Approximate spacing between each batten = Number of spaces
     • Number of spaces + 1 = Number of battens
     • Width of battens x Number of battens = Total width of all battens
     • Length of wall – Width of all battens = remaining length of wall
     • Remaining length of wall / Number of Spaces = Spacing between each batten
3. Cut battens to fit around windows and doors and cut angles needed
4. Attach baseboards and top boards first
5. We used LiquidNails AND finishing nails to attach the boards to the wall. You need the LiquidNails because there is not guarantee that you will hit a stud on every batten that you nail in. The LiquidNails will be what holds the boards up and the nails will act as clamps until the LiquidNails dries.
6. Attach battens
7. Wood putty nail holes
8. Sand putty
9. Caulk the seams between the boards and wall
10. Paint! 👩🏻‍🎨

Here’s a full how-to video for this project!

We painted the board and batten on the walls Snowbound by Sherwin Williams in their Duration line Satin. The contrast between the white walls and dark teal ceiling really makes the ceiling pop and draws the eye up.

The light fixture in that room desperately needed an upgrade, so we grabbed this one at Lowe’s ⬇️ We also grabbed a matte black HVAC vent cover to replace the old white one, so we didn’t have a white rectangle sticking out in the middle of our dark ceiling.

We have received some mixed reviews – some say it makes the room look 👀 bigger + the ceilings taller and others feel like the ceiling is crashing down on them 🤷🏻‍♀️ what do you think? Accent ceiling 👍🏼or 👎🏼?

Always,