It’s time to showcase our remodeled dining room with a new flat panel wainscoting look and a fresh, contemporary paint color.

If you check out the gallery below. you can see a glimpse of how our dining room looked when we bought the house two years ago. It had a faux plaster treatment from the chair rail down (this is really apparent in the second picture where I have the chair rail removed), and a fading light brown color on the walls above. Altogether we thought it felt a little dark, so we decided to give it a make over and a some historical country charm.

Since the plaster treatment was so thick, and I knew I wanted to use the drywall as the “panel” of the flat panel look (instead of actual wood panels), I decided it would be easier to simply rip out the drywall up to the four foot mark. Conveniently our dining room is almost a perfect 12′ x 12′ square, so I was able to buy 4 sheets of 4′ x 12′ drywall and install them with no seams after just a little cutting around the windows and the breakfast bar. Less seams means less taping, mudding, and sanding… WIN!

To create the wainscoting, I used 4′ x 8′ sheets of 3/4″ MDF, first ripping off 8′ x 10″ strips to use as the baseboards and then a series of 8′ x 4″ pieces to use as the horizontal rails, and then finishing with 4′ x 4″ and 10″ x 4″ pieces to use as the vertical pieces. To get the classical profile, I used a reversible router bit – which meant that I was also going to have to do a lot of mudding and sanding of the routed MDF edges because MDF gets very fuzzy when you paint it. Using drywall mud, or some very thick primer (like Kilz) helps to eliminate the fuzziness, but you’re still in for a bunch of hand sanding.

And I have to admit I’m not much of a planner, so I was doing everything on the fly. It would have been so much quicker (or at least our house wouldn’t have been a construction zone for as long) if I’d have planned it all before I demoed the drywall to start. Once I determined my pattern, the work was just very repetitive and quite simple because of this. The only tricky parts were handling around the light switches and outlets (which if I would have planned, I could have avoided).

Once all of the pieces were in place, glued and nailed, I filled in the seams between boards (which were very minimal) with wood filler and then did a light sanding. A coat of semi-gloss white was the finishing touch on the wainscoting, while a steely blue eggshell was the color of choice for the upper walls.

I plan on doing a similar treatment up the steps and into the upstairs hallway. When I do, I’ll make certain to write up a “how to” on the reversible router bit I used for this beautiful wood work.

* This post may have affiliate links, which means I may receive commissions if you choose to purchase through links I provide (at no extra cost to you). As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for supporting the work I put into this site.