The Room Stylist: DIY Project: Wainscoting & Chair rail

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I can't believe it's the work week already. Oh well.

I wanted to keep you up to speed with the progress at my sister's new home. On Saturday, I went to see her new place in person. Before then, I had only seen photos. It's such a great house, and there's so much room! I have to admit, I'm really jealous of the walk-in closet in her master bedroom. One of the added benefits to owning a newer home. Our 60 year old Colonial definitely doesn't have a walk in closet.

Well, I volunteered, along with my awesome Dad, to add a chair rail and wainscoting in Melissa's dining room. They had just painted the dining room, the color I suggested which looks amazing, Sherwin Williams "Riverway". It's this deep blue with hints of gray. Mel and Chris love it. They have high ceilings in this house, so to have the entire dining room in this deep blue would have been too much so I took on the task of building the chair rail and wainscoting with my dad.

What you'll need:

-Measure the perimeter of you room to figure out how much linear feet of chair rail you'll need.
-With those dimensions, sketch out how wide and how tall you want your boxes to be. Write everything down. You can then figure out how much of the trim you'll need. We bought the trim that was a little less that 1" wide and the chair rail was 2 5/8".
-Nail gun & nails
-Air Compressor
-A level
-Tape Measure
-Miter Saw

You basically need to cut 45 degree angles to create your trim pieces to make the boxes, same for the chair rail pieces. Where the chair rail ends at an opening, we made a 30 degree cut.

Here are some progress photos. I can't wait to see it all finished and painted white! I'm leaving that part to my sister and brother-in-law.

The dining room painted in SW-Riverway. Please ignore the poor quality photo. My iphone made the color look more green. It's definitely a blue.

Dad measuring our first chair rail piece. that's the Miter Saw and you rotate it back and forth to create the 45 degree cuts. along the edge are markings for different degree cuts.