There are only a few places left in our home that are original to the previous home owners. The upstairs hallway is one of those places. For the first few years of us living there, we left the color as it was – beige. Heck, we even put our pictures and decorations in locations that already had nails in place. Well this last summer, I had some time off and decided to change things up a bit.
We really like the board and batten look that we did near the front door so we decided to mimic that in this hallway.
The first step was to paint the top half of the walls and the doors and door trim. We chose a blue-ish grey color for the walls and the doors and door trim was a high gloss enamel from Sherwin Williams. I also removed all of the floor trim.
After the trim, doors, and wall were painted, I went to the hardware store and purchased a few sheets of 1/2″ mdf. I have Kreg Rip-Cut attachment so cutting the boards to the necessary width was a breeze.
I first attached the new baseboard making sure it was level. I then used a few precut vertical pieces to calculate where the top horizontal board should go.
Of course not all of the pieces lined up perfectly but that is why using MDF and wood putting works so well! Filled in the holes and sanded down the edges and before long, everything looked perfect.
I capped the trim with a simple 1×2 pre-primsed piece of MDF and did a simple piece of molding underneath the trim.
A coat of primer and a few coats of the white enamel paint and we were done!