DIY Dining Room Wainscoting & Chair Rail

hey guys what's going on Welcome Back we've got a fun project today we're going to be adding some chair rail and some wainscoting to the walls in my dining room I've been working on this room for a few days giving it a refresh add in a bunch of matrim moldings as you can see I've already done new baseboard new crown molding along the top but today is going to be all about chair rail wainscoting we're going to give this room a really nice look super easy to do so we're going to walk through it step by step let's get started [Music] all right first things first let's have a look at the pieces that we're going to be using for this project these are both from the metree option M line we have the chair rail here this is a really nice profile it's two and a half inches deep so it's going to look really nice on the wall and then for the wainscoting we're just using a pretty simple panel mold we're going to be doing wainscoting boxes across the wall and uh I think it's going to look really good but let's get to it first things first let's install the chair rail on the wall foreign before we get started just a quick note on some of the tools you're going to need when you're taking on this kind of a project number one is a brad nailer of course you're going to need that if you don't want to glue stuff to your walls which I typically try to avoid I don't like gluing anything to my walls because I ever want to make changes it's a lot easier to pull out some brad nails and fill those holes than it is to rip glue stuff off your walls and have to patch up drywall and you know what I mean other than that your Basics tape measure pencil now to keep a nice straight line I'm using a laser level if you don't have a laser level no big deal grab your tape measure a pencil Mark out your wall works just as well this is just a little bit faster so let's get started I'm starting with the longest wall in the room this is 22 feet exactly I'm using a 12 foot length of chair rail which is great because I'm only going to have one joint on the wall I'll make a scarf joint to try to join that as nice and cleanly as I can the ends will just be butted right to the end of the wall because the piece that comes to join it will be coped and it'll be a nice clean joint at the ends so let's go cut this thing one quick note this Hutch weighs about three thousand pounds there's no way I'm getting it out of the room I got all the other furniture out of here before I started this thing's just gonna have to be kind of moved around like a Tetris piece as I go along the walls it's really heavy don't tell my wife that I put this piece of chair rail on it but let's go let's get it cut in put the put the first piece in thank you all right so we're ready to go with our first piece like I said the one end is going to butt right against the wall the other end is a scarf joint and what we're going to want to do is just line this up right so that the top is right in line with our laser line or with your pencil marks whatever you decided to to use to mark your wall and uh just nail it on in so let me get my nailer and we'll do that foreign all right we're ready to go here one thing before I nail in this first piece just a quick note you might be asking hey Dom you never mentioned how you decide how high up the wall to put your chair rail good question here's what you do typically the rule of thumb is you want to be one third the height of your wall my Wall's nine foot tall so easy calculation I want the top of my chair rail to be at the 36 inch mark it's as simple as that so let's nail this first piece in and get going around the wall because we've got a lot to do so far so good [Music] Okay so we've got this wall done we're going to be getting to that back wall pretty soon but before we do that we just need to finish off this little corner here can't see real well because of the light coming in from the window but we've got this little piece here between the wall and the window so we're just going to cope a little piece fitted in there and that'll be done and we can move on to the other wall so let's do that real quick and get this chair rail done so we can move on to the wainscoting okay on to the back wall let's get this piece in first of all though I need to move this monster out of the way so that my laser line can hit this back wall so let's move this and get going you know what that's good enough we can just move the laser oh look at that that fits perfectly all right perfect I'm going to move on to that last wall I don't need to bring you along for that I'll do it real quick so we can get on to the wainscoting that's going to be fun I think there's a lot of measurements all right we're ready to go on the wainscoting I've already got the pieces for my first box cut and ready to go but before we get started just a couple of quick notes when it comes to wainscoting number one when it comes to figuring out your dimensions and your measurements and spacing for your wainscoting boxes it's not that difficult there is some math involved you can figure it out on your own but these days with the Internet it's that much easier go into your search engine type in wainscoting calculator and you're going to get a number of options they're all good they all help you out all you need to do is figure out your measurements type them all in and it'll tell you exactly what cuts you need to make and how many you need to make to get the right number of I wanted to make even spacing both above and below and to the left and right of each box so the way it worked out on this wall and you can see by my laser line here that I'm going five inches from the top and five inches from the bottom as well as five inches to the left and five inches to the right of each box so based on those measurements and the height of my baseboard and my chair rail I was able to get the exact dimensions of all the pieces I needed to cut now a couple of other things in terms of putting up the wainscoting I'm not going to be using just the brad nailer in this case and here's why when it comes to baseboard or chair rail or crown molding it's very easy to run across and get your studs in the wall and the nail into a stud is good enough to hold that thing in place for a long long time but because the chair rail is spaced out and the boxes are going to be in different places you're not always necessarily going to be able to get a stud now the chair rail is very light material it's not the end of the world but just to give a little extra security I do use just a couple little dabs of construction adhesive on each piece before I nail it in just to give it that extra little hold in case we're not getting a stud which we're not going to get a stud on on probably most of them all right so for the wainscoting I'm using this panel molding from matry I actually have all of the products I've used here Linked In this video in the caption so go check that out if you want any specific information on any of the parts that I've used here but here's a quick look at this panel molding and the profile of it it's going to look really good up on the wall and when it comes to wainscorting boxes actually super super simple there's only one cut you need to make and that's a 45 degree angle so that your boxes meet up 45 degree cuts on either side of every piece and you're good to go So based on my requirements here for the wall and wine to leave five inches of space all around each box I ended up with needing two pieces at 32 inch and two pieces at 16 and three quarter inch for this specific wall it'll give me seven boxes at that size all evenly spaced five inches apart all the way around let's get started getting this thing up there now one quick note as I put my construction adhesive on the first piece and again like I said it's just a tiny little couple tiny little dabs just to help secure the piece you don't need a lot of it the nails will do most of the hard work yeah but this will help in case you have anybody trying to rip panel molding off of your wall I don't know why anyone would want to do that but you never know so now I've got my laser line marking my top half what I've done to make my life easier is I took a leftover scrap piece of my baseboard you can use really anything you have and I cut this to exactly five inches wide so I can now use this together with my up and down piece I don't think that's what the technical term is for it but I'm going to call it an up and down piece and I can get that on there and leave proper spacing so that I can get the right spacing for my top piece let's get that on there right at the laser line once we're happy with how we have that sitting can let go of this and get our nails in foreign [Music] thank you it's looking good let's get the rest of this wall done [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] that's it this Wall's done all right that's it a little bit of caulking to get those nice crisp lines on our boxes get all the furniture back in here put everything back in place including that monster of a hutch and we're done that's how easy chair rail is that's how easy wainscoting is I'm no expert if I can do it you can definitely do it it's a very DIY friendly project it's going to add a ton of character to your spaces if you want to know more about these great Matrix products check it out in my caption I've got them all listed exactly what I used in here including the baseboard and the crown molding so check those out if you have any questions leave me a question in the comment I'll do my best to answer it and that's it until next time I'll see ya [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: M Inspired Living

Views: 73,701

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Id: oA-PGLt_TWw

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023