Welcome!

We created wainscoting in our DR, and here's what we did:

Chair railing on the top, baseboard on the bottom. For the "boxes", we simply created picture frame squares out of picture frame molding and applied them to the wall; then we painted the whole thing gloss white.

It looks fantastic -- and it has two advantages over your method -- it's much less work, and it was much easier to calculate our unequal wall lengths.

Just a thought...

Sorry, forgot to attach a photo. Here's what we did:

Hi Weedyacres.

Mclarke makes a good point: what's less important than the actual material for your wainscot--stained hardwoods in a traditional construction with floating raised panels & stiles with beaded edges; painted MDF board with chamfered corners & flat panels; or simple stock moldings applied to the walls--is their overall proportion.

At 42 inches high, your upper rail may look awkward. Unless someone is doing a late Victorian or Arts-&-Crafts-style room, when the style was for extra-high dados, 36 inches is about the highest that looks good, and in small rooms, it usually looks better lower than that. My dining room has a chair rail that's a few inches too high and it drives me crazy. It's the reason that the whole room is painted white: using a color on the upper walls would only emphasize the clumsy proportions. My chair rail is original to my 1926 apartment, so I just live with it, but you can heado off the problem at the pass with nothing more than a roll of newsprint, a level, some masking tape & a few hours of experimentation. That should be enough to let you figure out the exact height that looks the best in your room. As for the size of the panels, another thing to consider is where your furniture is going to fall. In other words, a series of identically-sized panels may not be the best solution, even though it would be the easiest.

If, say, you're planning on having a large mirror hanging above a console table that's flanked by a pair of armchairs, you'll want to make sure your panels relate to the placement of those pieces, perhaps with a large center panel flanked by narrower ones. What you don't want is to have six inches of one panel sticking out on one side ot the arrangement and 15 inches on the other side. That just looks amateurish. If there will be electric sconces on a wall, you may want narrow panels to fall directly below them. If there is a window on the upper part of a wall, the panel below it should be the same width as the window, with the remaining panels on that wall adjusted accordingly. In other word, it's never a one-size-panel-fits-all situation, and basically it's the same reason an off-the-rack suit often looks like hell when you try it on in the store. It was sewn without any reference to you, and the nominal size of said suit is merely the beginning. It has to be fitted to the actual dimensions of your actual body.

At any rate, there's lots of things to consider, things you might not normally think about, but which, if they're not adequately thought out ahead of time, will end up messing up the look of your room. And that's the thing: most people know instinctively when something isn't right in a room, even though they may not have had the training to be able to pinpoint what the exact problem is. So work those little issues out ahead of time and avoid that little problem.

One thing that's a hard-&-fast rule--and, fortunately, since there aren't many of those in decorating, they're easy to remember--is that whatever the width of your panels, the stiles are always consistent. Also, they are narrower than the width of the floor-to-bottom-of-the-panel dimension & wider than the top-rail-to-top-of-the panel dimension.

Regards,
Magnaverde.

Now I'm having second thoughts on how high to put mine in my foyer. I wanted to put it higher than 3 ft., actually I wanted it 4. It's a 10 x 10 foyer and the ceilings are 10'. What do y'all recommend would look best?

Thanks for the input, mclarke and magna. I considered doing the picture frame method, but like the look of the other (more complicated) better (call me a masochist!). I'll play around with paper/tape to lay it out. Glad to know the few rules there are....I'll stick with 6" stiles everywhere.

Have fun, Weedy!

Masochists are always welcome here. Come back and post photos when you're done!