One Room Challenge Week Four, The Structure
Hello friends!
Welcome to week four of the One Room Challenge, we’re really hitting our stride now and seeing all of our planning from the past years, months weeks, come to fruition!
If you’re just tuning in, you can check out the before’s and catch up on what we’ve been working on to-date below:
Week One | Week Two | Week Three
Since we’ve lived in this home I have always admired it’s beautiful features, from the antique mirror to the soaring bay windows, but one thing that I always felt it lacked was “structure.” I knew the dining room especially needed another architectural element to balance those features that we were lucky enough to inherit.
I contemplated going with board and batten for a time - I love the simplicity of that style, but that felt a little but heavy for this particular home and not quite in fitting with the overall architectural style. Next, I looked at panel moulding, which seems to be gaining a lot of popularity at the moment (although it’s been around for centuries) and ultimately decided that was what I wanted for this space. It would add that little bit of decoration and structure, and after it was installed we could paint it to give that area of the room more definition while staying away from a heavy-handed look.
In case you’re unfamiliar with wainscoting, it is decorative paneling that can come in several styles and is often found in historic homes. Historically, it wasn’t merely decorative, but also offered protection for the walls themselves. Early wainscoting was particularly used to make the rooms in stone buildings more comfortable, both by insulating the room from the stone itself and reflecting radiant heat from wood fires.
Heidi Caillier Design, Photography by Haris Kenjar Photography | Colombe Studio, Photography by Kasia Gatkowska | House of Brinson
Another reason I chose to add wainscoting to the space it because I knew I wanted to add some sort of decorative element to the walls, but I didn’t want it to be something that extended from floor to ceiling. Wainscoting offered an opportunity to break up the lower portion of the wall and include a different decorative element above the panels. I have to be honest and say that the easy of installation definitely played a part in my decision - for the style that i chose, we did not have to remove any of the existing trim or baseboards.
The wainscoting we installed consists of two elements, the first being the chair rail, which runs horizontally along the walls around the perimeter of the room. We chose this profile from Metrie for it’s reference to traditional profiles, as well as it’s particular thickness that works well with our door casings. For the panel moulding, we should a simple, ogee profile from Metrie as well.
There are so many different directions you can take when considering the details of these different elements and how they work together. Many other more elaborate/detailed moldings that can be added, but our home has fairly modest details in the rest of the interior (for it’s size and age), so I wanted to ensure that I selected profiles that still felt in keeping with the home overall.
The installation of the panel moulding took just a day for our contractor to complete. We do have one tiny area in the corner that we need to finish up since we ran out of moulding. I rough planned most of the panel dimensions ahead of time to get an idea of the linear feet, but failed to account for the losses related to the miter cuts on each piece, which equates to over 300” in total, so while I ordered “extra” it was not quote enough. Lesson learned!
Below are a few photos of the wainscoting in progress. the first image shows the installed moulding, the second two illustrate just how much painting can bring the whole design together into one seamless element.
That’s it for this week, our Carla Weeks mural is in progress and I couldn’t be more excited to share more on that next week, as well as the reveal of a delightful piece of preserved nature that we’re going to be adding into the space! Until then, keep following along on Instagram stories for all the updates and sneak peeks!
xx,
Nicole
