A Standard Issue Space Becomes a Charming Living Room

She explains, “Technically, for traditional board-and-batten, you would cover a wall with boards and hide the seams with the battens, but my walls don’t have any texture, so I just used battens, and I think it looks great!” To finish off the setup, Rose once again grabbed her nail gun to attach cove molding to the edges of all of the boards, used wood filler and caulk to hide the seams, and then applied paint over the entire area to give it a finished look.

While the living room now looks totally different and is full of architectural interest, the whole redo was fairly budget-friendly, costing roughly $1,000 in total for everything. “I chose to use cheap wood because it was all getting painted anyway,” Rose explains. “The board-and-batten cost about $300, and the built-ins cost around $700. This includes the four individual cabinet doors I ordered, which cost $65 a piece and were definitely worth it!”

Despite Rose’s previous DIY experience, this endeavor was a demanding one. “This is the largest and most challenging project I’ve ever taken on,” Rose reflects. “This was also the first time that I drew up my own plans for a project rather than following an exact tutorial by someone else. It was definitely a little nerve-racking at times because I was teaching myself everything as I went. DIY work is usually pretty forgiving, though — if you mess up, you just pull that part out and try again.”