Board and Batten Accent Wall
If you haven’t seen the video, check out above! I built this board and batten accent wall with floating shelf to spice up this room.
How to Calculate Spacing
If you want to have your battens spaced evenly across the wall, you need to do a little math. Here is a simple walkthrough!
Step 1: Measurements
You need to have three measurements to begin. I’ll give mine as examples.
Length of the wall: 138” (11.5’)
Width of the battens: 3.5” (1x4 lumber)
Approximate spacing for the battens: I wanted mine between 16” and 20” (or let’s say 18” for something in the middle)
Step 2: Calculate Number of Battens and Spaces
First we need to do a rough calculation to figure out how many battens and how many spaces.
length of the wall / (approximate space + batten width)
138” / (18” + 3.5”) = 138” / 21.5” = ~6.4”
So what does this mean in terms of how many spaces we should have between the battens?
We can round down to 6 spaces and each space will be a little wider than 18”
We can round up to 7 spaces and each space will be a little narrower than 18”
I chose to round down, so I will have 6 spaces and 7 battens.
Step 3: Calculate Exact Spacing
Almost there! Essentially, what we need to do is subtract the width of all the boards from the total wall length. Then divide that remaining space by the number of spaces we will have.
width of all boards = (number of boards) x (board width)
width of all boards = 7 x 3.5” = 24.5
remaining space = (wall length) - (width of all boards)
remaining space = 138” - 24.5” = 113.5”
exact spacing = (remaining space) / (number of spaces)
exact spacing = 113.5” / 6 = 18.92”
18.92” is kind of hard to find on a tape measure though! It would be somewhere between 18-29/32 and 18-15/16. In the video (at the top of the page) I show a trick on how to use story stick to mark the spacing pattern along the wall and then adjust for any error to get perfect spacing.