I have a thing about stairs, really a thing about entryways. They are the first impression to your home, and even though they tend to be a place that you pass through quickly to get to the living space, they deserve love too! We updated our stairs in 2021, so this is the second phase of this update. When searching for inspiration for this space, I kept stopping on foyers with beautiful trim work, more specifically board and batten, on the walls.
As a recap, here is what our foyer looked like when we moved in:
And this is what it looked like after we updated our stairs:
For a hot minute, I thought about doing this project myself, but I am SO GLAD I talked myself out of it. These are really tall walls (safety hazard) with a lot of angles to work around (MATH and precise cuts) and definitely needed the work of a seasoned professional.
They started by priming the grey walls before moving onto the trim work. Our carpenter and project manager first drew a rough outline of the trim with pencil for me to sign off on before attaching any boards.
They used ¼ inch thick MDF cut to 2.25 inches for the vertical boards and 3.5 inches for the horizontal boards with a 1 inch cap on the top to give it a finished look. You can see the details in the photo below.
Once the boards were on the wall, he used his nail gun to secure the boards to the studs (where possible). There were a few odd shaped walls that we had to test different layout options on, I found that less was more in these situations. It’s a whole lot easier to add more trim later vs removing trim.
After the board and batten work was done and I signed off on everything, they got to work on filling holes, caulking and painting! The prep work for this project was insane and took the longest, but once they were ready to spray, it was quick!
I am SO happy with the result! What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
