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Our wainscotting makeover on a budget is part 1 in a 4 part series breaking down the makeover of our entryway! Stay tuned next week for part 2. Sign up for emails and get them straight to your inbox!
Do you have a part of your home that you just accept as a boring, but necessary, space? For me that was the foyer. We live in a cape, so “foyer” is really a generous name for it. Its a tiny bump-out of our home where the front door lives. We don’t even use the front door! But it exists and the house would look silly without it.
I never really knew what to do with that space as far as décor goes. It was always just kind of there, being boring. Then recently, I decided to just… do something about it. I had recently painted our staircase SW Urbane Bronze and was so in love with the way it spiced up the living room that I wanted to keep that feeling going.
Inspiration strikes
My husband is so supportive of my crazy spur-of-the-moment décor ideas, but if I come out of left field with an expensive change he gets skeptical. So to keep him on board, I had to do this for as little money as possible. I went down to the garage and found some left over wainscotting from my daughter’s nursery. Instantly, ideas were forming in my head.
While he was at work, I put some painter’s tape up to visualize the chair rail and toyed with it until I found the height I liked. Apparently he was looking for another project to do too because there was no convincing needed!
I chose a height that was slightly more than a standard chair rail to try and stretch the space out. Its so tiny, so any illusions of it being larger is a win. We attached it to the wall with liquid nails and some finish nails.
Disclaimer: Using liquid nails on sheetrock will usually ruin it if you remove it later. So please be sure you will like this/keep it for a long time before gluing! We had no intentions of changing this so it wasn’t an issue for us.
Once the wainscotting was on we added the trim on top. After that, we put some caulk to seal the edges along the top, bottom, and corners of the wainscotting. This really makes it look finished and is so worth the extra effort!
I stuck to my color scheme from the living room and painted the trim SW Urbane Bronze. It really is such a nice, warm black. In certain lights it looks grey, in others its a chocolatey brown.
Instant gratification
I love looooove how the wainscotting looks in the foyer! It made such an impact and cost us $0 since we had all the materials left over from other projects. Next week I’ll be sharing the DIY tapestry I made to hang in the space.
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[…] it can be as colorful or monochromatic as you want! I just added black wainscotting to my white entryway, so I wanted to go darker with my color […]