My Flippin' House: Wainscoting 101

I mentioned in my previous post that we were thinking of doing some wainscoting in the library... Well, just saying you want to do it and actually figuring out EXACTLY what you want done is an entirely different matter.

How high up the wall do you want it? How thick will the slats be? Where do you center them in the room? How do you handle the corners? Connect pieces at a 45 or 90 degree angles? How do you transition the design to stairs? What kind of chair rail will cap it? Do you build out the baseboard more now that you're adding the wainscoting? Is the back of the wainscoting wood? Just the wall? Or some other material?

That's just a few of the questions we faced in thinking up our wainscoting. I have always loved the look of it, and knew I wanted it somewhere in my house... But exactly how I wanted it to look was a bit of a challenge.

I went through tons of pics on Pinterest, Houzz and Google images, tried to identify what I really liked and didn't like... And tried to integrate them into a plan that would work for this room...

Here's just a few designs I tested out in PowerPoint so I could work out some of the above questions.

We decided to put Micah board as our backing... Simple, cheep, and smooth... And it worked just fine... Only issue really came down to the fact that this is a really old house and not only are the walls a little crazy (not 100% flat or straight) but the floor also slopes... So... Instead of trying to make everything exactly level (which didn't look right in the room for how skiwampus it actually is (how the heck do you spell that anyway??)) so we decided to "Do as the Greeks do" and *please the eye*.

The Greeks (if you didn't know this already) were master builders. But they didn't build everything perfect. They built them to LOOK perfect... which is entirely different. For example, the columns along the front of the Parthenon don't actually all stand perfectly straight up... This is because when you stand and look at it from the front, perspective would naturally make the columns near the ends look as if they were tipping outward, even if they were perfectly vertical... So... to heck with perspective, let's make it look perfect, and tilt the columns near the outside towards the middle so they look right. ;-) LOL! (Don't believe me? Look it up!) That's just one of the many architectural tricks that they did on many of their buildings.

Anyway, back to our small library (which is far from a Greek temple)... We had to just kind of eyeball where the chair rail would look flat... Even though it turns out there's nearly a 3/4" difference from one side of the room to the other!!

Still, I think it's turned out pretty amazing. Not 100% finished (as we still have to clean up and paint all the trim, and sand and refinish the floors... Oh, and paint the ceiling, and get rid of the creepy dangling lightbulb...) but the room is nearly there!!!

What do you think?? I just LOVE how the color of the floor looks with the colors of the walls! Sooo didn't even think about it till after we'd painted... Lol! Pulled back the plastic to "holy cow, forgot about the floor color, and it totally matches!" Unfortunately we'll lose that color when we sand the floors... So decision time again, stain them dark again, or let them age naturally? I'm impatient and I want to stain them back to this color... Kevin wants to let them age naturally. Hogwash!