Scratch that.  I take it back.  For the record, I actually did get a gallery in place (with a couple place holder frames and canvases) and I kept it up for a few days before I couldn’t take it anymore.  It felt cluttered and messy and wasn’t cohesive with the gallery we hung above the fauxdenza.

Plus, since we will most likely take a more eclectic approach to pillows and accessories, the array of frames and art was too over the top for this room, in our opinion.  The decision to not hang a gallery above the sofa in the living room turned out to be a great choice for two reasons.  1. We hung a lot of that art in the laundry room and it has done wonders for that room.  2.  It allowed us to revisit and begin executing the original idea we had for that wall–wainscoting!

When we first started revamping this room, we shared a slew of inspiration photos of fully wainscoted walls.  Two, in particular, encompassed our desire for dark walls and paneled walls:

After we painted the room, we wanted to give it some time to evolve before we dove in.  I am happy to say, the time is here.  The room has evolved, we nixed the gallery wall and started hanging paneling last night. Eeee!

But before we bought the wood and started nail-gunning it up, we planned the wall out.  We knew we wanted the clean-lined, shaker-style wainscot–but weren’t sure how many squares (or rectangles) would look best on our wall.  When we initially had the idea to do this months ago, we were in contact with Wainscoting America looking at their prefabricated panels, but ultimately decided DIYing was the way to go for us.  The good news is, their design tool is free to use, and has already made this project a breeze for us.

We just plugged in the dimensions of our wall and how thick we wanted our boards to be, then we could play around with how many horizontal and vertical panels we liked.  We ended up loving this, more rectangular, paneling look.  The tool even told us (at the bottom) the exact width of the inner panel.  Huzzah!  Obviously this is when you could order it from their site, but we were happy to forego that and pick up some 8 foot boards (we used 3 1/2″ pre-primed mdf) from Home Depot.

We are only giving ourselves 3 nights to do this project. Last night, we started by framing out the whole wall first, starting with the top and bottom and then the left and right side.

Once we had that framed, we started on all the vertical pieces.  Most residential walls, like this one, are the standard 8 ft, so it was quick work to measure and trim a little bit off of each 8ft board and nail or glue it up.  Yes. Glue it.  Let me (try to) explain–where’s Chris!?

Ideally each board would be nailed into a stud.  With these vertical boards laid out every 16.778 inches, we missed the stud more often than not, and because they were hung vertical, there was no chance for part of the board to reach a stud like you have with horizontally hung boards.  So, we used Liquid Nails made for hanging paneling and then finished the board by nail-gunning in a few nails on an angle for extra measure.

Less than 2 hours later we had the whole wall framed and the vertical panels hung:

To ease your minds, after all the boards are hung (tonight!!) we’ll caulk, spackle, sand and paint the paneling the same almost-black (Kwal’s Crave) as the rest of the wall.  We don’t watch very many sports around here, and I don’t claim to know much about baseball–but the current state of our living room, with those highly contrasted stripes, makes me feel like I am living in a baseball hall of fame or something.  Am I crazy?  Or maybe just going crazy.  Can’t wait to get the horizontal boards up tonight! See you for part two tomorrow?? Hope so!

Disclaimer: Although we were initially going to partner with Wainscoting America for this project, we decided against it and stuck with our DIY roots.  They didn’t pay or perk us to be mentioned in this post, and I especially hope they aren’t mad that we still used their free design tool for our benefit and then told the blogosphere about it. :)

Update: See the finished results here!