Move over "Hardy Boys"

One of the disappointments with our new house is the lack of interior architectural trim. We still have the colonnades and window trim, but it appears that there were once built in book cases(flanking the living room fireplace), a buffet in the dining room bay window; and based on our neighbors floor plan and the remnants on the colonnades, there would have been wainscotting and a plate rail through out the dining room.

At some point in its history, the house was used as a rental, and the bookcases were removed. The dining room fared worse however; as the buffet and wainscotting were removed and the walls then sheet rocked.

We had been intending to eventually remove the sheetrock and try to recreate the wainscotting; however that was several projects down the list.

A couple of nights ago, while merrily stripping the colonnades, I moved on to the adjacent baseboard and discovered that it was a different type/finish of wood. Not too surprising considering that they probably mangled the original baseboards when they removed them. What was interesting though was the way the front of the baseboard protruded out past the front of the adjacent door trim.



I hadn’t noticed it before, but it everywhere else in the house there was about 3/4" depth between the wall and the front of the door trim. In the dining room, that was down to 1/4" or less. Hmmmm. Surely they didn't just slap the sheetrock on top of the wainscotting?

I figured the best way to check, was to open up the light switch and see what was behind it. Yep that’s real wood back there. You can also see the reduced wall->door frame clearance in this pic.



The next step was to make a small, inconspicuous(?) hole to see what was really under there.


After a round of self congratulations, we moved on and stripped the rest of this part of the wall.





It now seems that we now have wainscotting in the dining room. We still need to replace the vertical battens and plate rail, but we're under way to returning the dining room to its original glory, and we didn’t have to strip paint off the wainscoting.