Fast Efficient Wainscoting - Value Engineered Wainscoting Details

Hey, what's up guys? Doing some wainscoting today and wanted to talk to you about value engineering your wainscoting design. Now, there's all kinds of Pinterest pictures and stuff your client might give you of very high-end wainscoting details where there's elaborate joinery that needs to be used and just takes a lot more time. But I wanna show you how I often do wainscoting to value engineer it in a way that I can get it done quickly and give a great price to the homeowner and the builder and achieve a really good look for a much lower price while still maintaining the quality. So we'll dig right into this. As you can see on the floor, I've got my one by six going around the base perimeter. That's gonna be just like that. We're not doing any profile baseboard down there. And then I've got my rail, my horizontal rail cut and my vertical stiles are cut also. So I'm gonna get to installing that and I'll talk to you a little bit more about how this design works in a little bit. Now, the first hack that I like to use is on the corners and the stiles. Now, this piece of trim here is actually technically a casing. It's three and a quarter wide. As you can see on the back, it has the back relief dadoed into the back like you would on a normal piece of casing and the edges are already eased. So it works really good to put adhesive in this cavity on the back and then stick it to the wall. Now on the corners, we want to have the same width on both sides for the stiles, both sides of the corner. So some guys might say, well, I need a wider piece for one of these. Let me just show you. Let me just show you here. So you can see I've left this off the back of the wall a half inch. This is five eighths thick. So then I can just butt my next piece up to it and that'll give me my corner and I can use the same material for both sides of the corner and I don't have to have a wider piece there. So what I just did was actually scribe. You can see my scribe line going down this thing. I scribe this piece to this piece since the corners are not perfect. So I'm gonna go and I'm gonna cut that on the table saw, bring them back down and install these. I've got my corner stiles in and there's a number of different ways you could do it from here as far as putting the stiles in first or putting the top rail on and then the stiles. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and put the top rail on and try and pull it down a little bit in this area between the end and the first stile. That way I can kind of snap these center pieces into place and I can ensure that it'll be nice and tight. I wanna show you these corners again just so you know what I'm doing. If you look at it from the top view, you'll see the dado on the back of this. That's the relief cut for the casing. Works really well with construction adhesive to stick that to the wall. And then this space ensures that I have the same on both sides and it looks nice and I don't have to worry about wider material on one of these pieces that way. So I've been doing that for a long time and it works really well. Gonna go ahead now, you can see on the floor, I've got my rail pieces. I'm gonna start putting those across. Couple notes on nailing these, using PL premium adhesive. So once that stuff cures, these are gonna be very stuck to the wall. So all the nails are really doing is holding the trim in place while the adhesive cures. Now, as far as nailing pattern, I'm going about every 10 to 12 inches and I try and scissor nail. So the nails are not going in straight, they're going in at an angle like so. What that's gonna do is it's gonna give it some resistance from pulling out. Sometimes I'll also try and nail up into the wood on the top and the bottom. If there's a hump in the drywall, that helps resist the fight against that hump and keep everything nice and tight. So just using my Brad nailer here. That's good on the old stabilo level. 18 gauge nails go in like so. You can also use the same nail hole. What you're gonna do is shoot once, rotate gun, shoot again. Shoot once, rotate gun, shoot again. And that's gonna ensure that those nails are going out like that. That's gonna give it some good resistance. So this wainscoting, as you can see, it goes in really, really quickly. And that's what makes it a great value. So let's talk a little bit about the different aspects of this that make it very cost effective. Number one, you're using the drywall as your backer. A lot of wains, you'll add a panel on the back. That's additional materials, additional labor. With this quick and dirty style, you're just using the drywall. And so it's really effective just to go over the top of it with wood. The second key thing that I did here is avoid complex joinery by offsetting material thicknesses. And I can't stress enough how key that is to offset your material thicknesses. If you look over here at this door casing, we went with a thicker door casing just in this room, same for the windows. It's an inch and a quarter thick. It could even be just one inch thick, but the key is to get it thicker than what my rails were, which are three quarters of an inch thick. That way, this joint can be caulked and it's not flush. It's got an appealing offset here. So then this material is three quarters of an inch thick. And you'll notice that the styles are five eighths of an inch thick. And as I mentioned previously, this is casing. So it works really well because it's got that back relief cut and it comes with the edges eased already. Now I do sand all of this again, since it is a Wayne's, wanted to make sure I get any machining chatter marks or whatever, scratches, sand all that off. But it's really quick just to go to town, have the lumberyard deliver this stuff, chop it up. I cut all these to length with my stop block. So I know they're all exactly the same. And as you can see, by pulling this rail down slightly, whenever I was installing it, I was able to snap these pieces in and everything is nice and tight under here. Now, whenever this is painted, the painter will be able to caulk this joint lightly. And what's gonna happen is that caulk joint is gonna absorb any of the wood movement and that is not gonna crack. Now, the biggest reason I don't have, let me grab a one by four. The biggest reason a lot of Wayne's coating gets to be very labor intensive and time consuming is because of flush joiner. This is a full three quarter inch thick board. So if I were to go the same thickness here and here, I would have to have pocket hole screws, biscuits, glue, pinch dogs, a number of things, but there has to be a secure connection between this piece and this piece at that joint. Otherwise with seasonal movement, that is gonna crack. I've seen a lot of jobs where trim carpenters will just piece stuff together like this without adding any joinery in this joint. And without fail, you go back a couple of years later and there's a black cracked line right across here where it has broken and it's just very ugly. So with this technique, I save the labor of that elaborate joinery and then by offsetting my material thicknesses, I can utilize that bead of caulk right here to absorb any seasonal movement and it's gonna look great for the long haul. So that's why this, I call it quick and dirty wainscoting is so effective. Now I know some of you are probably wondering about layout, maybe even critiquing my layout here, but this room was a doozy, let me tell you. First off, you wanna try and always work things out so you've got the same widths on all your walls between your styles. That is a challenge because you've gotta work with windows, doors and outlets to get everything to come together. Here you can see just on this wall over here, I've got three completely different sizes and so it's hard to know what to do with it. So I ended up, I don't like the divider there, but I think it looks better than no divider. That wall's a lot better and then I was able to pretty well carry the same width across the rest of these. So whenever it's painted up, I think it'll look good. The one weird thing I had was on this corner because of this window, I really, it kind of looks weird whenever you put these vertical pieces under a window sometimes and they're not symmetrical. Some people don't like that and I didn't like this corner at all because if I went with the same width here, I was gonna end up with a style like right here and that would not have looked good right up next to this window trim. So what I opted to do was I took my width that I was gonna have between this casing and my style and I matched it on this side. Then I took this width and I matched it on this side and then divided the rest of this wall up and I think it looks really good on this window wall right here because I've got the same widths across the bottom and my styles under the window are symmetrical. They're offset the same on both sides of the window. Not as big a fan as this side but there just wasn't much I could do about it. It's a little bit wider here than over there but in my experience, once all this gets painted up, it looks just fine. So it kind of is what it is. You do your best. Also had to avoid outlets obviously everywhere and it can just get kind of tricky. So there's always that. But I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Again, we're talking about a value wainscoting here. I do this a lot. It works great for those mid-range homes and it paints up nice. So let me know if you've got any questions in the comments. As always, don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe and appreciate everyone who supports on Patreon as well as clicking through those tool links that I always put in the notes. I also get a kickback for that from Amazon and that helps support the channel also. So thanks again. We'll see you on the next project. Have a good one.