Meet A Fabuless Home, Week 24

I’m so excited to be here! Tammy has such an amazing blog and fun personality. I never stop by that I don’t laugh or get inspired or learn something new.

My husband and I recently bought a new-to-us home. The decor was stuck in the 1980s and we’re going room by room and giving it a major facelift. So far we’ve tackled the Family Room, Kitchen, Mudroom, and Powder Room (check out MY HOME TOUR for all the before and afters!). Now we’ve taken on the Dining Room and it’s just in time for a surprise birthday party that I threw for my best friend this past weekend.

Note: I do not recommend attempting a complete room overhaul with just two weeks before a party for 60 people! STRESS!

Here’s the before of the dining room:

Seriously HO-HUM. Nothing inspiring at all. Plus that green is a lot more olivey than it appears in these pictures.

I’ve always wanted wainscoting. It adds so much character and age to a room. Plus I’m all about the architectural details. I already had the chair rail, but it was REALLY small. It may have been only 1/2 in. thick. I think the wainscoting was actually thicker than the original chair rail, which would look really odd.

We didn’t necessarily want to pull the existing chair rail off because it could do serious damage to the walls (it was really well attached with glue and nails).  Hubs to the rescue! My husband added wainscoting and used the same wood to add to the profile of the chair rail.

Better already, huh?

Here’s the finished product with wainscoting and new chunkier chair rail:

Here’s the deal with my blog. You can basically find a tutorial about anything on the internet and for wainscoting there’s around 4,375,367 tutorials out there. I’m not going to bore you with another, but you can find some good ones at CENTSATIONAL GIRL and SQUIDOO, Instead of a full tutorial, I have a series called “What I Learned” and I try to give you some of the information that I couldn’t find in the other tutorials plus some tips and maybe one or two missteps that you should avoid.

What I Learned: Wainscoting

1. If you have fairly smooth walls, you really don’t need a panel underneath the wainscoting. We chose not to because we could achieve the same look and we would have had to remove the existing chair rail to put it up (the lip of the panel needs to go under the chair rail. Some people prefer the extra glossy look and I can understand that. We chose to use a glossy paint and I love the look.

2. Measure once, cut twice. I know, I know… you’ve heard it before. Seriously. Do. It. Cutting twice is no fun. I mean, I’m not saying that we had to make additional cuts 6 times 3 times once.

3. Plan the squares ahead of time. We actually drew our squares on the wall (I can’t believe I didn’t take a picture of that!). They weren’t perfect, but they gave us an idea of where everything would fall and how many squares per wall. It especially helps to avoid outlets and windows.

You can see here where we had to drop the top of the square to avoid the window casing. I wish I had a better picture of that.

4. Spacing is really up to you but there’s a little math involved. We used 3” all around and that helped us to determine how long the squares should be on each wall. You want them to look uniform all the way around but they don’t’ all have to be exact. We generally did about a 25'” square, but some walls used squares that were slightly smaller or slightly larger.

Calculations:

(# of squares + 1) * 3 = Length of wall for just the spaces between squares

Length of the wall – Above amount = Total length of wall space for squares

Total wall space for squares/# of sqaures = Length of each square

Confusing right? Here’s the calculation for a 100” wall with 3 squares

(3 + 1) * 3 = 12 inches of space between squares

100 – 12 = 88 inches of squares

88 / 3 = 29.33 = Length of each square on the wall

5. Use glue on the back of the paneling and then use finishing nails. The nails will hold the panels in place while the glue dries. We used Liquid Nails for Wood.

(He he… I love making my husband pose for pictures. He hates it)

6. Putty around the edges, inside and out. Most walls are not completely flat (which is where the paneling could be helpful). My walls were actually slightly warped, so some of them got A LOT of putty.

I hope that was helpful! I would show you a full shot of the room but at the time of these pictures, my dining room table looked like this:

Another project for another day!

Since I can’t show you the whole room, I guess you”ll just have to come visit me for the full reveal.

Thanks again to Tammy for letting me hijack her blog for a day!  I hope you’ll all stop by a visit me!

Maury, thank you so much for being a guest, your blog is such and inspiration to me.  I just love reading it and stealing borrowing all of your wonderful ideas!  The dining room looks amazing, I will definitely be by to check your progress.