I installed board and batten in my first floor bathroom a few years ago and in my kitchen a week ago. While both rooms have board and batten they are designed slightly different. I decided to add this how to board and batten tutorial to help make it easier for others who want to do this too!
First I measured the walls where I wanted the wainscot to be both horizontal and vertical.
Bathroom wall measurements for one wall; 82″ wide I had a general idea of how high up I wanted the top of this to go 53.5″ high. I knew I was using 1 x 4’s and 1 x 3’s for this project and I wanted to keep the old baseboard since I liked the style, had that old baseboard been your standard baseboard I would have just removed it all together and used a new wider baseboard. I took off the old baseboard and installed the new baseboard (1×4) to sit behind the old base, then I installed the top board (1×4) at 53.5″ up from the floor. I decided where I wanted the second horizontal slat of wood to go, 6.5″ below the top rail I used a 1×3 for this horizontal piece. Once all these pieces were installed then I started cutting the 1×3’s for the vertical slats of wood. For the lower half of the board and batten these 1×3’s were placed leaving 13.5″ between each slat of wood, for the upper half half of the board and batten I placed these slats leaving 5.5″ between each slat. You can see this in the diagram below.
Once I had all the slats of wood up on the wall all that was left was to paint!
The kitchen board and batten was even easier since I did not add the second set of slats at the top like I did in the bathroom. For the kitchen I wanted the board and batten to be much taller then what I used in the bathroom because I wanted to be able to hang baskets to get the clutter off the counters and to hide the phone jack that’s on that wall. Since I was only putting the board and batten on one wall I did not want to take the original baseboard off since the new baseboard wouldn’t match the old where the current baseboard meets the baseboard on another wall so I left a gap between the old baseboard and installed a 1×2 above this old baseboard. The phone jack was the determining factor on where the vertical slats would be positioned.
Here you can see the phone jack on the wall 
Here is the final result of both rooms
**You may notice I cheated on the board and batten, I only used the battens, my walls are smooth so I didn’t see the need for the board behind the battens.
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