Wainscoting Reveal!

Hooray! The wainscoting project is done! It's been a long process for sure, but I think the finished product looks great.  

As a reminder, here's what the room looked like to start with. It's hard to tell from this picture, but that wall color was a greenish-yellow, both above and below the chair rail.

And now:

We started this project by painting the wall above the chair rail Mindful Gray by Sherwin Williams.  Then, we painted white below the chair rail.  We purchased moulding from Home Depot and made picture frame panels for the walls. We made 12 18x23" boxes, 2 6x28" boxes, and 1 7x23" box.  We mitered the corners to form the frame with a saw and miter box. We used Liquid Nails to form the frames and adhere them to the wall.  The boxes are space about 6" apart on the wall, with 3.5 inches above and below.  Then, we caulked all of the seams with the wall and corners of the frames.  One final coat of paint on everything... and voila, finished wainscoting!!! 

We're really happy with the outcome. This is a classic example of a DIY project. You can save so much money by taking on a project like this in your home. By spending the time and labor to create the panels and put them all up, you will add value to your home and create a custom look.

 

Happy Halloween!!

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a fabulous weekend. We were really busy and it went by so fast.

I'm going to share the wainscoting reveal later today, I can't wait for you to see the pictures. It's really a huge improvement for the room.  Also, I made and finished the curtains (!!!) yesterday. It was a TON of work, literally 8+ hours straight of work, but I'm so happy with the results. I now know why people charge so much for the labor to make curtains and drapes.

On Saturday, we went to a Halloween party at our next door neighbors' house. It was really fun and we really enjoyed hanging out with everyone.  Kevin chose last minute to go as Dwight from The Office and I went as Kate Middleton.  

Tonight is Halloween and we're so excited to get some Trick-or-Treat-ers! Last year we had none, :( but that's what happens when you live in an apartment.  Darcy even has a costume to wear to great everyone at the door with. He's going to be a hot dog!  I'll post a picture of him in his costume later.  

Happy Halloween!!

Weekend Plans

This week was a busy one and it's gone by pretty fast! We have a fun weekend ahead and I'm really hoping to make a lot of progress on some of the projects we're working on. We also have a Halloween party to go to on Saturday at our neighbor's house. So, we'll need to come up with costumes for that as well pretty quickly.

I'm really hoping to finish caulking the wainscoting panels in the dining room. It's a really easy project, but it takes time and patience, going around each side of each piece of moulding.  Maybe we'll even get to painting everything, we'll see about that.  I also want to touch up the paint and finish the wine lattice in the kitchen cabinets.

The fabric for our dining room curtains arrived yesterday. Thanks to super fast, FREE shipping from LS Fabrics! I was really excited that it got to us so quickly and of course, I had to take some pictures of the fabric and how it  looks in the room. So, I pinned some of the fabric up by the window in the dining room. I'm so excited about how it looks, I know it will look really great when it's actually made into curtains. I particularly like how the lattice/scroll pattern looks when it's gathered or pleated.

Loop de Loop by Duralee in Smoke

Curtain Fabric

I finally ordered the fabric for our dining room curtains yesterday!! I ordered it from Lewis & Sheron Fabrics in Atlanta and got free shipping.  I can't wait for it to get here! I'm hoping to make these curtains myself with my mom's help. 

Hopefully the fabric arrives soon, so we can get started!  Here are two pictures of curtains made with the same fabric.

Wainscoting Update!

This weekend, we took on the wainscoting project in the dining room. I'm really excited about our progress, because just after starting I was worried that it was going to be too much work and not come out like we hoped.  We bought all of the moulding for this project at Home Depot. The 8 ft. pieces were relatively cheap and we needed 15. So, compared to getting a contractor to build custom wainscoting or buying the pre-made panels, this ended up being the cheapest option. However, it was definitely a lot of work... and we're not done yet!

I first sketched out the plan for the room and calculated how much of the moulding we would need. I figured out all of the spacing for the boxes on the walls.  We then, got to cutting the 45 degree angles in the moulding. Basically, it's like making picture frames. It took 8 cuts per piece of moulding. We used a miter box and hand saw to make the cuts. Again, an inexpensive option that just requires a little more labor.  Most of the boxes were 23" x 18" but we made skinnier rectangle to go under the windows and on the short walls in the room.

After cutting the angles and checking all of the measurements, we made the squares. I used Liquid Nails on the cuts and pressed them together to form the frames. This takes a lot of patience, the Liquid Nails can be a pain to work with because you don't want to get it on your hands.  You have to make sure all of the joints fit together just right and that you are keeping the frame square.  The Liquid Nails that we got had a working time of 30 minutes, so that meant it took about 30 minutes to harden, but that we could also make adjustments for a while after putting them together. I laid them out on newspaper on the floor and outside on the deck.  I tried to let them all dry for a couple hours before moving them. I did move one too early and it was super fragile and came apart at the corners so I had to reglue it again.

After allowing them time to dry, we got ambitious and decided to get them up on the wall Sunday night.  I used pencil to mark the walls for where the panels should go. It was really helpful to have this done beforehand, because you didn't really have to worry if things were square or level when you put the panels on, because you had it all laid out beforehand.

We used Liquid Nails to secure the frames to the wall.  Because the moulding that we selected is a polymer blend, it's actually really light and won't require nails to secure it to the wall. If you're using hardwoods, I would definitely recommend finishing nails to secure the wood.  I ran a bead of liquid nails around the back of the panels, then we placed them on the wall, holding it in place for a couple of minutes. We added tape to keep the moulding in place, but it probably wasn't even necessary. This was mostly for my sanity. I was afraid that they would fall down or something terrible would happen in the middle of the night, but nope they're secure! Here are some pictures of where we're at now.

I still need to caulk all of the panels and paint everything again.  I'll update with more pictures when we've got that done. It's pretty exciting that we were able to get this much done this weekend. What a change a little bit of DIY and hard work can make!

Before

After