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Wainscoting Over Drywall
Our next project is to put fake
wainscoting in the hall and up the hall stairway. The wainscoting will
match similar decoration which is already in place in the adjoining dining
room. I don't have any knowledge of whom or where the person is who did
this room. I have found identical molding at Home Depot and am about to
venture doing the hall, but I wondered if you have any suggestions for
this project.
Do we need studs in all the right places or will gluing help enough that
we don't have to worry, even where the corners need to match?
Is there an easy way to measure and cut the miter angle for going up
the stairs? What are the pitfalls we need to be aware of? Anything you can
think of I'm sure, will be of great interest and value here.
Sincerely,
Marty
I
have never installed wainscoting, but I have installed the same
tongue-and-grooved pine boards for ceilings.
One thing is for sure... you won't be satisfied if all you do is glue
and nail the T&G boards to drywall. To do it right you need nails to
penetrate into wood framing by about 3/4 inch... 1/2 inch at the
minimum. I've seen wainscoting applied with Liquid Nails and after 5
years the glue just turns brittle, cracks and lets go. Not a good scene.
There are two choices for materials: Tongue-and groove planks and
paneling. I have seen some decent looking real wood beaded paneling for
wainscoting, pre-cut to 32" long. This can be applied to a
drywalled wall and just nailed to the studs. The edges of the panels
must fall on studs or they won't stay in place.
With T&G planks, you really need to install some sort of horizontal
wood furring strips, spaced apart vertically no more than 16 inches.
There are several ways to reach this goal. First, you could cut strips
out of the drywall, just a bit wider than the furring strips. I would
use 1x4 clear pine furring strips, which is 3/4" thick. But this
will make the planks stand off the wall by 1/4", assuming you have
1/2" drywall.
It is hard to find wood that is 1/2" thick, although you can get
high-priced furniture-grade wood of this thickness at Home Depot.
You can also remove all the drywall in the areas that will be covered
with wainscoting, and then install 2x4 blocking between the studs. I use
deck screws or drywall screws to install blocking like this, because it
holds better and doesn't shake up the walls as much. But this approach
will likely leave your wainscoting at a plane that is behind the plane
of the original drywall, as these planks are usually around 5/16"
thick. So your chair rail would need some filler strips to conceal the
difference.
The trickiest part could be making or buying thin strips of wood to fill
in behind the chair rail molding to accommodate the different
thicknesses of materials.
I've used a pneumatic brad nailer or finish nailer to install planks
like this, shooting nails on an angle through the tongues, so the groove
of the next board covers the nails. This can also be done with small
hand-driven finish nails but it takes much longer.
Going Up The Stairs:
For this part, you need to measure the angle of the "Nose
Line" which is the imaginary line that connects all the noses
(front-most part) of all the stair treads. Measure the angle between
this line and horizontal. You can just lay a straight board on the
stairs and measure between this board and a level line. When you miter
the ends of the chair rail pieces on or adjacent to the slope, you will
cut at HALF this angle, measured from VERTICAL (i.e. measured as degrees
AWAY from making a perfectly square cut on a miter saw.) Try some
practice pieces with scraps of trim or 2x4's and you'll see what I mean.
Bruce W. Maki, Editor.
Marty replies:
I was looking to put up "fake" wainscoting, by which I mean only
putting up the molding part. That's what was done in our dining room and
we're only trying to reproduce the same effect in the hall and the
stairway. I understand now the complexities of putting the entire project
up, including the paneling, and it makes the project far less attractive
if I take that approach.
Do you think I can get the same effect by putting only the molding up, and
would your answer have been the same concerning the possibility of nailing
and gluing without regard to the location of the studs if you'd known we
were talking only about the molding?
And we replied:
Oh THAT kind of fake
wainscoting!
Yeah, I've seen that. Some people put wallpaper below the chair rail and
paint above. It can look quite elegant if a good wallpaper is used. Or
you can just paint above and below.
Installing just a chair rail is pretty straightforward... there is no
need for any filler strips. Since you are spanning across the studs, you
need to locate the studs with a stud finder and just nail away. If you
want, you can apply a bit of Liquid Nails to the back of the chair rail.
At the corners there should be studs to nail into.
I always paint or finish trim before installing it, and then touch up
the nail heads.
Bruce W. Maki, Editor
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