What?! Wainscoting?! No.

That was my reaction when The Husband first wanted to do some wainscoting trim in our Family Room. He wanted to do this way before we even started working on the house. I was flat out against it. No way. No How. I just couldn't see it working in our house. It didn't seem like 'us' at all.

We ended up putting the wainscoting trim in the Family Room because it covered up our oops with the floor in there. There was a bit of a height difference between the old floor that we cut out and the new floor so we wanted the extra thickness that the trim would provide to cover it up.

I think the Family Room ended up turning out pretty good:

It still bothers me that the bottom isn't painted. I am tempted to go out and tell the painters to paint it just so I don't have to look at it all ugly like that anymore. I am trying to be patient though. Once it's painted all white and pretty on the bottom I think it's going to look amazing.

Then when the drywallers came we hit a second dilemma (just in case you're new around here we've had more than 2 dilemmas, only two have involved wainscoting though). In the stairway there is a tall wall, I don't know many stairways that don't have tall walls, but our drywallers seemed to think that ours would cause a issue down the road. They think that because there is nothing breaking up the wall (like a landing) that the drywall will eventually crack. They suggested putting something over the horizontal drywall seam on that wall. I have never noticed cracking in other stairways and I don't know what makes our stairway different from any others but whatever we went with it and listened to them.

We decided to mimic the wainscoting that we used in the Family Room, in the stairway. We felt that this worked because the wall of the stairway and the east wall of the family room are the same wall, they are just broken up by the stairs. So if you stand at the top of the stairs going down to the Family Room/bottom of the stairs going up you can see the wainscoting in both areas. I have no idea if that makes any sense but I don't think I can get a good picture of it.

I am a bad blogger and I didn't take a proper 'before' shot. Here you can see that half of the wall is white and half is grey. The halfway mark is the part that the drywallers were worried about.

We (by we, I mean The Husband) used a piece of baseboard to cover up the drywall seam. We then used some leftovers from the window trim to make the verticals. We spaced the verticals about 2' apart because that's what we felt looked the best. We're really technical around here. 

This wasn't a huge job, I think it only took The Husband about an hour and a half or so to do the whole job but it has a huge impact. It really changed the look of our stairway. After The Husband was all done I think we stood and stared at the stairs for a good 15 minutes saying 'this doesn't look like our house'. And it doesn't, but in a good way.