Perhaps I should correct myself - I did not not the full wainscoting. It's more like picture frame moulding, but it was much easier and cut down on wood costs significantly! Before we moved into our house, I did the flooring in our dining room (I'll do a separate post on that later). Therefore, I felt very confident in tackling the decorative moulding in our dining room as well. Since I thrive under extreme pressure, I decided to begin the project 5 days before Christmas... and I hosted Christmas dinner... WHAT WAS I THINKING?! Anyhow, here's how it went:
For reference, here's how the previous owners had the dining room:
Here it is after we had it all set up. Don't mind my mess. I didn't think about taking pictures until I had already begun measuring and planning my picture frame moulding:
Clearly, I began decorating but then promptly stopped once I realized I wanted to tackle the project now!
The first thing I did was spackle anywhere there were dents, dings, and scratches in any walls. The previous owners had 2 large dogs and they did not take very great care of the house. Then, as seen above, I eyeballed the height I wanted the chair rail to be and marked that with painters tape with the help of my laser level. I measured the height from the top of the baseboard to the blue line and marked the adjacent wall with it. Then came the trickiest part - the measuring and calculating. The wall below the mirror was the easiest since there were no windows to work around. The rest of the walls have windows or doors to work around, so I couldn't just cut a bunch of same-sized frames and start to nailing - no no! The windows each have short rectangular frames with rectangles of various measurements filling up the rest of the walls. I had to do a lot of estimations followed by calculations and recalculations. I eventually decided on 3.5-inch gaps on all sides (above, below, and between each frame). I wanted the frames to be similar in size, so I calculated whether to do 3 or 4 frames on this wall or that and came to my average size of 18 inches wide (all about 18 inches in height as well). Then I marked my frames on the wall using painters tape:
*I should also mention that I laid down newspaper and used painters tape to protect the flooring before I began spackling, sanding, and wiping down the walls. However, I did not do this when I spackled our side entrance door, which is just left of the above photo. The result would be the white dust all over my dark floors! Woops! Thankfully a dust pan and a wet mop get that out!
Phew! Now that I had everything marked to make sure it looked as even as I imagined, I used my calculations to figure out how much chair rail and how much framing trim I would need. I added my 15% for excess and screw-ups (let's be honest - I knew I would cut something goofy somewhere!) and began a shopping list. Thankfully, a friend had let me borrow multiple of his power tools, including a compound mitre saw. Another friend had agreed to let me borrow his battery-powered nail gun with an in-tool air compressor and a safety! All I had to do was buy the nails I'd need (18 guage brad nails). I knew I wanted to have the whole bottom section white, so I bought some satin finish pure white paint, a few new brushes, etc. and then.... I began!
First, it's important to note that any time you are working with wood, it needs to sit in the room/house to acclimate (meaning it needs to get used to the temperature and humidity in your house). I let this stuff sit for 2 days, then got to cutting. I began with the chair rail. On longer walls, you'll want to separate the wood by cutting it at 45 degrees from the wall. This helps hide the cuts once it's finished. See here:
(Don't mind my finger partially in the picture^^, ha!)
Once I had that all set on all of the walls, I cut a piece of cardboard to 3.5-inches wide and used that as my guide to mark my boxes on every wall using pencil. After I marked everything, I went back and re-measured everything. "Measure twice; cut once!" I wrote all of my measurements down on a paper and set up shop in the basement, cutting all the trim then bringing the pieces upstairs. Thankfully this was super easy since all of the cuts were 45 degree angles. Then I used the nail gun to secure the boxes, piece by piece, onto the wall:
Silly outlet is not in the best place, but it works! It looks better than I thought it would. After all the pieces were secured to the wall, I used paintable caulking to fill in every nail hole and smooth out any gaps and corners, such as the following:
While I did go ahead and used paintable caulking, I would recommend something else. Maybe wood filler? The reasoning for that is that it's tough to get it smooth. If it's too wet, you'll wipe the caulking right back out of the hole. If you wait a little longer, it's too dry, and you can't wipe it at all. I suppose you could sand it to smooth it out. I don't know. I'll probably go back with wood filler one of these days here, but I needed to get this done before Christmas, and I just did not have the time to worry about it right now! (I know, shame on me for not taking the time to do it just right). Alas, I learned some new things.
Finally, we painted the bottom portion white and the top portion taupe. It took 3 coats of white and 2 coats of taupe. Here is the final product, which was all ready for Christmas Day!
And here is my lovely Christmas dinner tablescape:
I'll have to do a Christmas home tour, even though it's already past Christmas. I still have everything up of course, so I better hop to it, huh?!
I hope you found my tips helpful, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave 'em below! Happy Holidays to you and yours! :)
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