Tag: Chair rail

  • Creating the Guest Room of My Dreams in 3 Simple Steps

    Creating the Guest Room of My Dreams in 3 Simple Steps

    So you’ve planned out a room renovation with visions of two tone paint, box trim and chair rail – now what? Continue reading for my simple 3 step plan to bring your vision to life!

    In my last blog post, I discussed planning this renovation. From ideation to ordering materials. So once everything has come in, it’s time to start! Let’s get into it!

    Prep & Paint

    The first step is to prep your room. This would involve the following:

    1. Take down any art or anything hanging on the walls
    2. Remove outlet covers/switch plates as needed
    3. Patch nail holes and any other imperfections on the walls
    4. Remove any small furniture or decor
    5. Roll up the rug, fold it or cover it
    6. Lay a plastic drop cloth over the floor and any large furniture

    If You Plan To Paint a Two Tone Room:

    Now your room and belongings are ready and safe from mistakes! The next step is for those of you who are painting a two tone room. In my last blog, I discussed my plan to hang a chair rail 41 inches from the floor of my guest room. If you have a similar plan, now is the time to simply draw the line on your wall. If you have a laser level, that works great here. If not, it totally works to just measure and draw the line on the wall every few feet. This is because the line doesn’t need to be straight! The chair railing will cover the line itself. However, if you’re not planning to hang a chair rail or trim to cover this line, you’ll want to measure it precisely, tape, and paint carefully!

    Painting

    The room is now entirely prepped – yay, go you! Now it’s time to start painting! Typically, it’s recommended to start with a hand brush in detailed areas. So this means you’ll be painting the following areas by hand:

    1. Any corners or crannies where your roller can’t get in
    2. An outline around anywhere you’re not painting
      • This would be the inside of the door jam, along the ceiling (if you’re not color drenching), along the floor, around windows, the line splitting your two tone room, etc.
    3. Around fixtures in the room
      • If you’re color drenching, this’ll be your ceiling fan/light
      • Either way, this will be around the light switches and outlets

    For me, this step always requires two coats, so factor that in. But I recommend painting the detailed areas, painting the room and then returning for a second coat of both.

    Now that your room has all of the details and the little spaces painted, it’s time to roll the rest of the room! I’ve shared my process in other posts, but I use an 18 inch roller. I like it because it allows me to get more coverage with each roll. However, the liners and covers are more expensive to replace. I’ll also say that it’s so long that it’s difficult to efficiently roll the paint at the end of the frame. So whatever roller you like is perfect!

    Trim

    Now that you’ve prepped and painted, it’s time for step 2 – trim! Let’s start at the very beginning and assume your trim just came in. That’s right, “came in.” I am a huge proponent of ordering from the hardware store (I’m a Home Depot girlie). It’s so much easier and less hassle than trying to navigate the numerous aisles and long pieces of wood that don’t fit in the car.

    Cutting Trim

    I’ve discussed this in other posts, but cutting trim takes a little thought and then it becomes second nature! Assuming you followed my last post and/or you have the measurements of the boxes you’ll be hanging, the cutting itself is easy. You can use any saw, really, but I love this saw! We got it for cutting floor planks when we replaced our flooring, but I’ve used it in almost every project since.

    Once you’ve cut the trim to length, you now need to cut both sides at an angle to fit together like a picture frame. Personally, I find cutting quarter round really difficult mentally. However, cutting trim is really easy! I use a homemade angle, which is just a piece of wood I cut at a 45 degree angle on both sides.

    Repeat the process for the chair rail and you’re done!

    Trim Hanging Prep

    Now that your trim is all cut, it’s time to hang! I know that using liquid nails is a thing – but I don’t recommend it. Liquid nails is great, but it makes the project permanent. If you decide you don’t like the spacing between the boxes, you make a mistake or if you/the next homeowner want to do something different in the room, you’re screwed. Using a good old fashion nail gun will secure these in place. And some caulk along the edges will give it the flush-to-the-wall look that liquid nails does.

    Now, if you don’t have a nail gun or have never used one – I have some thoughts! I bought this one because it’s on the economic side. However, that means I had to buy an air compressor to get it to work. The air compressor was expensive and it’s so heavy. It’s also really really loud and it makes working with the nail gun so tedious. And the nail gun feels like a tool that is so versatile and needed in most projects. So it’s a bummer! If you don’t already have a nail gun, I seriously recommend saving up and buying an electric one. This is the one I have my eye on.

    So either you have brad nails and a nailer or you’ve ordered one. In terms of nails, they can be short. It really doesn’t take much to hold trim in place! Once you’re ready to get to hanging, you’ll need a couple things to make it successful:

    • Tape Measure
    • Level
    • Brad Nailer
    • Brad Nails

    Hanging Trim

    It’s important to start with the lower piece of trim in each box. This will ensure they’re all the same height. I did 4 inches above the top of my baseboard. This also means I hung the chair rail 4 inches above the top of my boxes ~balance~.

    1. For the first of the four pieces, you’ll want to use a short level. Set the level on top of the trim and in the middle. Once you see it’s level, put a nail every 6-8 inches or so. I can’t express how light these pieces of wood are, so minimal support is needed. However, it’s good to ensure they’re as flat to the wall as possible.
    2. For the second piece, it can be either side piece! Line the piece up to the lower piece you just hung, making it as square as possible. Then pull out the level and make sure it’s straight. Nail in place!
    3. Repeat this process for the third piece. The third piece should be the opposite side piece (not the top)!
    4. Lay the top piece on top of the 3/4 box you just hung. It should fit nicely into the space! Use the level to make sure it’s straight and nail in place.
      • Small note – it’s okay if it’s not 100% perfect. The putty you’ll use to fill the nail holes and inside seams will fix any small gaps/issues.

    As a note – I tried taping the pieces up first to make sure I was doing it right and it did not work. It created such a headache! Nailing and just pulling the trim out if needed is much much easier.

    Repeat the process for the chair rail!

    Finishing Touches

    Congrats, you’re on the last step! Now that your trim is hung, it’s time to make them look professional!

    1. Fill the nail holes – I do this with spackling (don’t come at me), but really any kind of putty or wood filler would work here.
    2. Fill the inner seams – I use spackling to fill the seams on the inside corners of the boxes. I choose spackling over caulk because it’s much cleaner to fill up and brush away excess than caulk
    3. Caulk the outside and inside edges of the boxes – remember to run your finger along the edges to smooth the caulk and wipe away excess. I recommend cutting the tip of the caulk bottle as small as possible. The less caulk, the easier it is to add more than it is to deal with a ton of gooping over-flowing caulk!

    Repeat these processes for the chair rail!

    Paint Touch Ups

    Now that the box trim and chair rail look beautiful and seamless and professional, it’s time to paint! A note on painting the chair rail if you’ve gone with a two tone room – tape the flat wall that is against the top of the chair rail! It’s important to caulk with the tape because it creates a crisp line. Once the caulk is a little dry (like 20 minutes), paint with the color of the chair rail. Then you can peel the tape immediately after. Doing this will ensure the caulk doesn’t fully dry. This creates a crisp line and prevents the caulk from peeling up with the tape if it had fully dried. Repeat as needed if your paint bleeds onto the wall.

    Decor

    Okay, let’s review! You’ve painted the walls, hung box trim and chair railing and touched everything up. Now is a good time to put the outlet covers and switch plates back on. You’ll need to clean up after the spackling, because it gets brushed off the wall and it falls to the ground. You can wrap up the drop cloth for reuse later or throw it out. Put the furniture back and un-roll the rug. Now what?

    If you’re type A like me, you may have already created a vision board for the decor in the room.

    However, if not, fret not! If this is also your guest room, you’ll need the following items:

    1. Side tables
    2. Lamps
    3. Bed, bedding, pillows
    4. Curtain rod and curtains

    For bonus and flare:

    1. Rug
    2. Art
    3. Mirror
    4. Throw blanket and pillows
    5. A luggage rack
    6. Coasters
    7. Extension cords for charging devices
    8. Welcome basket

    Sourcing Decor

    I recommend finding inspiration on Pinterest. Just type in a a keyword or two on the vibe you want. For me, I started out searching “guest room” and then Pinterest recommended to use “English country” because apparently that’s an overarching style in my entire Pinterest board collection haha. I saw soft and warm green rooms and I loved them! I also noticed notes of red, pink and orange in some of the rooms I liked. I specifically saw a floral pillow I LOVED.

    So I took this info to Amazon to find some options. I found a floral pillow set that I based the rest of my decor on. A “red brick” bedding and plain sheets (idea from Pinterest) plus these floral pillows and an oatmeal throw really completed the bed!

    I used the rug, side tables, lamps and curtains I already had. They’re all very neutral, so they easily worked with the bedding I bought.

    I also already owned all of the art and the mirror I hung! My favorite thing to thrift is old art. I don’t claim to have excellent taste, but I know an amazing painting (to me) when I see it! I pulled out my favorite pieces, tried different sizes and prioritized my favorite prints in places that I would be able to see from the hallway – dopamine boost!

    Congrats – you’re done! You’ve painted, added an interesting, professional and eye catching detail to the walls, you decorated it to your vision and put it all together!

    Pop some bubbly, take lots of pictures, heck, you could even sleep in there now! Enjoy it and know your guests will too!

  • Guest Bedroom Flip & Box Trim Planning

    Guest Bedroom Flip & Box Trim Planning

    So you want to flip a room in your home and you want to add box trim, but you’re not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place! I recently flipped my guest bedroom from an all-white, plain wall, art overload space to an elevated, old money style retreat for guests in our home! Through good old fashioned paint, box trim, chair rail and some careful planning, we turned this space into the guest room of my dreams!

    Ideation

    As with any project, you’ll need to figure out exactly what you want! I love Pinterest for this kind of thing, but you can find ideas anywhere! Magazines, design books, the internet, TV, etc. are all great places to find inspiration. The specific inspiration for the vibe of our guest room came to me while watching Baby Mama (such a good movie, right?). Tina Fey’s bathroom is a two tone, layered designed space. The style is almost giving early 2000s in an expensive home. And “old money” mixed with “English country” is kind of my vibe, so I ran with it haha.

    Some things you’ll need to think about – how do you want to feel in the space? How much work do you want to do? What is the design vibe (colorful, minimal, traditional, etc.)? And then as you accumulate specific design ideas like box trim, paint colors and art, ask yourself if this element you like works with your answers to the above questions.

    Something equally as important is to consider how this space ties in with the rest of your house! Typical design rules say that you should have a theme that flows from room to room in your house in order to create a cohesive vibe throughout. This just basically means you need to pick 3-4 colors that you’ll use in some capacity and some shade in every room. For me, all of the rooms in our house have brown (floors), white, green and then a small touch of some shade of a neutral red. Once you have a few pieces and colors that you know you want to roll with, I recommend putting together a mood board. Below is the mood board I put together for this project

    Your mood board could be more simple than this with just some swatches, a pillow, art and maybe a piece of furniture or a rug. It could also just look like a few screenshots laid on top of one another. I use Goodnotes to plan my mood boards because it has a cool free-draw cropping feature so I can cut out just the very specific things I like from different photos.

    A great thing about putting together a mood board is that it tells you whether your ideas all flow together. I was able to swap in and out different comforters and pillows to figure out what I liked. And the rug in the photo is actually the rug we already had in the room, so I was able to know that some of our current pieces in the room worked well with the new design and I was able to save money!

    This phase also helps you solidify more specific aspects of the project. This mood board forced me to pick a general design of the box trim at the bottom of the wall and pick a specific color from Sherwin Williams. You get the point, this is the time to get specific to make the actual implementation so much easier and takes all of the guess work out of the equation farther down the line.

    Get Specific

    Although we picked some designs and a layout, we need to get even more specific here. You know you want to paint the room a soft white, but what exact paint color will you use? Do you have a favorite brand? Again, I recommend using Pinterest here for paint colors, because you can find photos of the paint being used in different lighting (website reviews are great for this too!). And maybe you know you want to put box trim or chair rail in, but what exactly do these measurements look like? Do you want several sequential narrow boxes? Or do you want 1-2 large boxes per wall with a small box below? Use your inspiration photos to guide you and then get into the room to figure out what will fit your vision.

    For example, the photos of the chair rail + box trim that I saw and loved all had the chair rail above the height of the headboard. So I had a guide for where I wanted the chair rail and then played around with painters tape till I found a height I liked. Once I did that, I played around with painter’s tape to figure out how tall and wide I wanted the boxes to be and the distance I wanted between them. You get the idea, do anything you need to do until the next step is to actually do it!

    Since apparently, this has turned into a “Box Trim 101” blog, I want to give some tips and recommendations so you avoid the mistakes I made! I’ve covered box trim cutting, nailing, nail hole filling and seam caulking in other posts, but this one is all about planning! We decided to put boxes that were narrow and all the same size along the bottom half of the wall. But the key here is to plan the distance between boxes using the main wall! Emphasis on the MAIN WALL. The main wall is where your eye goest first. These boxes should fit perfectly on the wall and then that way you can extend it to other walls. If the boxes don’t quite fit on the secondary and tertiary walls, it’s no big deal! You can leave the empty space or create a smaller or half box on the secondary walls. This is all to say because if your main wall doesn’t fit your boxes, you’ll wind up with a half box bleeding through the corner and onto another wall. This can look good, but it’s much less clean and a lot more complicated.

    Another example of this could be that you know you want a cozy nook in the room. Okay, awesome! What size chair would fit? Do you want it to be a sleeper sofa? Do you already own the art you want to hang or the lamp for the space? If not, get to looking (I recommend always perusing Facebook Marketplace first!).

    Once you know all of the specifics of this flip, I recommend recording it with another mood board, because it’s fun! But you can also get the same results just from creating a note in your phone with all of the measurements, paint specs, and links. Below is an example of how I did this for our guest room flip.

    Materials

    Purchasing materials I think can be categorized under “planning” and “creating,” so I ‘m going to include it in this post. I say this because in order to purchase materials, you need to have completed planning! You can finish planning the last bits as you purchase. Now that you know what you want to do and what exactly everything is going to look like, it’s time to purchase materials! But… how much do you order?

    If you’re going with box trim, you know how many boxes are going in the room and their dimensions. So you have all you need to know how much to order! To walk through the math as an example – our boxes were 27 in. X 11 in. So I knew each box would require 27(x2) + 11(x2) inches of trim. This means each box required 74 inches of wood. And for our Reno, we had 23 boxes, so 23 X 74 = 1,702 inches total. Each piece of trim we bought from Home Depot was 96 inches. So 1,702/96=17.7. So we bought 18 pieces of trim.

    The same kind of math works for painting. Each gallon from Sherwin Williams claims to paint 350-400 sq ft of wall space. So it only took us exactly 1 gallon of paint to complete two coats on the upper half of the walls and the ceiling. Same logic goes for the chair rail too! We measured the length of the walls and added them up to figure out how many feet we needed and then removed the width of the two doors and the window in the room.

    Some other materials to consider beyond the obvious components of your changes, are the supplies that will get you to the finish line. For this project, that meant a tarp to cover the bed, roller covers for our 18 inch paint roller frames, paint brushes for painting the trim, paint tray liners, caulk for the box seams, spackling for the nail holes, and painter’s tape for the chair rail and wall.

    And the more fun things to purchase include things like bedding, decor, art, lamps, etc. I love this part because while the paint and other materials come in, I like to scroll through Facebook Marketplace, shop online deals and go to my local thrift stores to source what I need for cheap, and hopefully, sustainably!

    And once you’ve ordered everything and/or have a plan for purchases, you’re done with the planning phase of this project! Congrats! I’ll be following up to this blog post with another for how I prepped and executed on this specific guest bedroom renovation, so stay tuned!