Mother Trucker Designs

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Cottage Style Entryway

Cottage Style Entryway

Your entry is the first thing guests see when they enter your home. Making it a statement is an important part of your design. I love board and batten and I love shiplap. I have found ways to merge both styles into my perfect cottage style. Although I am just now posting this transformation, this was one of the very first changes we made to the mobile home we purchased. It was an easy project that could be completed in a weekend and won’t break the bank.

Our little home had a buttercream paint to the entry and fish wallpaper border when we purchased it. Even though this property is on the lake, I just didn’t see myself keeping the fishing decor. I more envisioned this property as a lake cottage look. Slowly I am (or should I say “we” are) transforming this home into just that, a quaint lake cottage look.

Here is a picture of the entryway before I had added my “cottage look” to it. Unfortunately, I forgot to capture the “before” picture, before I removed the fish border.

Since I forgot to get the picture of the before with the fish border, I just cropped in one another picture so you could see what I was referring to. I apologize for the grainy appearance of the picture.

There are two important things to keep track of while you are doing this technique to a wall. First, make sure that you utilize a level and mark the line that the top 1×4″ will be placed horizontally on the wall. The second thing you need to do is determine where your studs are. Most homes have 16″ centers for studs. This means that from the center of one stud to the center of the next stud is exactly 16″. I found out the hard way that this is not a true statement on a mobile home. The exterior walls of a mobile home all have 16″ centers while the interior walls seem to have studs at 24″ centers. That fact makes me a little nervous. I just don’t understand why the mobile home manufacturing industry feels that that is enough for stability and longevity of a home. Okay, enough of my griping. My point is just make sure that you mark your studs by using a stud finder.

Not all of my vertical pieces of board and batten ended up falling in front of a stud. That is where the wood glue and caulk will come in handy. Because the 1 x 2’s are so light weight, they just need a little tacking to the wall with a small nail. The glue will initially hold the board in place and once you have the wall completely painted with the first coat of paint, the caulk will finish and clean up the look to a professional install before you add your final coat of paint.

  • Materials used for this project:
  • 8 – 1 x 2’s cut at a length of 59″ (8 @ 3.29 = $26.32)
  • 1 – 1 x 2 cut at a length of 10′ 6″ (I used 1 and then the remaining piece came from scrap from above lengths after being cut = $3.29)
  • 1 – 1 x 3 cut at a length of 10′ 6″ ($7.85)
  • 2 – 1 x 4’s cut at a length of 10′ 6″ (I used 3 – 8′ boards at 6.71 ea. = $20.13)
  • small trim piece for ledge top (optional: only needed if you want to place frames on top for stability) – I utilized 10′ 6″ of trim. 2 @ 4.98 = $9.96
  • 1 piece of plywood ripped into 7 7/8″ width boards ($14.98)
  • part of a bottle of wood glue
  • 1 small tube of white caulk ($2.98)
  • 1/8 gallon of primer
  • 1/4 gallon of paint
  • 4 coat hooks ($9.98)
  • FOR A GRAND TOTAL OF $103.37

Now granted, I am not including the full price of the cans of paint which you might have to do if you are not totally transforming a whole house and have already included them in your budget from other projects. But this small entry way wall really didn’t utilize that much paint or primer. You could probably get away with just buying a quart of primer and a small amount of paint. I just always overbuy paint by only buying gallon containers because let’s just face it, there are a bunch of areas that you can utilize left over white paint. I have kids and grand kids also, so I know I’ll need to keep touching up walls and baseboards as we live and enjoy our space. My project cost right over $100.00 but if you don’t need the small trim for the ledge to hold picture frames, you can definitely do this for under $100.00.

There also was a partial wall with a glass insert when you first entered the mobile home. I have found a lot of mobile homes seem to have this feature. I assume it is to help define the entryway. Both my husband and I felt the partial wall and glass dated the home and made us feel closed in.

Oops, the recliner really wasn’t positioned there but as you move in and tackle projects, a lot of furniture is temporarily placed in unusual spots. You can see why we were not fans of this wall. It is definitely a feature from the 1990’s that we wanted to see leave.


There was a slight cost of removing this wall, repairing the floor, and framing out the door to a craftsman style door trim.. Since my husband and I are the DIY’ers on every project to date in this home, the removal was free and actually not that difficult. Even though I had bought the exact flooring for the master bedroom that was already in the rest of the house, the previous owners had left a partial box in the closet from the original. Because color can vary a little from batch to batch and definitely over time, I was able to lace in the extra old flooring into the spots where the wall base had been. This wasn’t as difficult as I thought it was going to be. Since the vinyl flooring bought was a floating floor, it was not glued down to the sub floor. The only cost for this portion of the entry change was just the purchase of two 1×3″ boards for each side of the door, one 1×2″ board (cut in half) to provide craftsman detail of the header and one 1×4″ board as the header.

  • Materials used:
  • 1 – 1 x 2 = $3.29)
  • 2 – 1 x 3 ($10.00)
  • 1/2 – 1 x 4’s cut at a length of 10′ 6″ ($6.71/2 = $3.36)

Basically, I was able to improve this door frame for about $20.00 utilizing the following materials. It isn’t a wow door frame now but it definitely doesn’t feel like an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ shrinking door any more. This picture was taken before the final finishes of caulk and paint were place on it.

Now all of these changes just fit in so well and mesh to the changes I am making to the dining space. I’ll show you shortly how I made the changes on the far dining room wall. You can definitely see the merging of the two styles is very important when you are dealing with an open floor plan.