Break out the power tools!

HandyMan and I decided to tackle the dining room first. Its a good sized room, 11x14, we're not tearing down any walls or anything, and it would a be a good room to try out our new power tool prowess in. Oh how I love wedding registries! We got most everything we asked for on our Canadian Tire registry - our mobile table saw, sander, drill, nail gun (HandyMan's favourite new toy), and the router (my favourite new toy). I've already got a long list of things I want to build with these puppies!


To prep the room, we needed to first remove the wallpaper. Lucky for us, there was only two layers and those came out fairly easily with the wallpaper steamer we rented. Who knew though, that old plaster walls + hot steam = big crumbly patches of plaster. Oh well, good excuse to practice our plastering skills. Tools in hand, we set out to create our own wainscoting from scratch.


First, HandyMan created a nice little CAD drawing, figuring out the dimensions of each panel. Then, because the walls were in such bad shape, we decided to attach flat pieces of hardboard to the wall as the base. Woohee, that nail gun sure made that an easy job. After the base was on, HandyMan cut MDF strips for the vertical and horizontal panels. I requested a little mitred corner on each end of the verticals just to add some interest. Once the panels were up, we painted them with two coats of primer and a coat of Benjamin Moore paint in "Distant Grey".