Wainscoting

If you ask a woodworker to picture a room they’d like to spend time in (besides the shop) they frequently form a picture in their minds of a room with lots of wood in it. Perhaps ceiling beams, a wood floor and wainscotting. If you have an older house, you might be lucky enough to have such a room. But if you have a newer home, more likely than not your rooms are painted drywall. You could pay a contractor to install a lot wainscotting, but because you already have woodworking tools, why not do it yourself? Here’s a quick, easy and amazingly cost-effective way to turn a “so-so” room into a “something else” room.

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Don’t Waste Plywood

The basic ingredient to making this project affordable is carefully cut 1/2" plywood. By making the wainscotting a respectable 32" high, a sheet of plywood will give you 12 lineal feet of paneling. Start by determining the lineal footage of the area you want to cover. Sketch out the wall sections on a piece of paper, including doorways. Using a two-panel, 46" wide section may not always work best for your room needs, and you’ll have to decide if changing the panel size will give a better overall look. Regardless, the techniques used in the article will work on any size panel. Remember, if you run into a corner, allow an extra 3/4" in length on one panel so it can tuck behind the opposite panel, without changing the panel spacing.

To provide a less “flat” appearance to the wainscotting, you cut inset panels from the main panel, sort of like removing the doughnut holes from doughnuts. Then you trim the hole with moulding that has a rabbet cut on the back. After that, you fasten the inset panel back into the surrounding face panel. Because of the way the moulding is made, the panel will be recessed. Finally you shim the backside of your wainscotting and attach it to your wall with 2" finishing nails.

The other tricky element to this project is joining adjacent panels of wainscotting in a way so there is a minimal amount of seam visible. Here’s how I tackled that: Each face panel has two inset panels in it that you remove from the surrounding panel by plunge-cutting on your table saw (which is covered in the story at left). One of the inset panels is surrounded on all four sides by the surrounding panel. The other inset panel is surrounded on only three sides by the surrounding panel. After you remove the inset panel, the end of the surrounding panel looks like a large “C.” When you attach two adjacent panels, you’ll have only two small 3"-long seams.

Start Cutting

The first step is to cut the plywood sheets to size, and then remove the inset panels. To be able to reuse the inset panels, you’ll need to use a table saw for this. The accompanying story at left explains how to cut out the inset ...

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