Dining room wall

Yesterday I worked on the dining room side of the wall. The first thing I did was install pieces of 2x4 in between studs for the wainscoting.


With that done I began working on the wainscoting. I picked out the 37 best pieces and removed all the nails from them. then I had to cut an inch off of each board. I had to do this because the floors, as it turns out, are not original, they were laid over the original floors so because of this I lost an inch of height over the wainscoting on the other walls.

With the wainscoting installed I installed the chair rail above it and the trim piece that goes just below the chair rail.



I know it looks like the wainscoting slants up towards the camera, it does this for a few reasons, one is that the floor slopes down towards the back wall, the other is that the support 2x4's I installed are level while the wainscoting follows the floor so it makes it look worse than it is. Once the drywall is up it shouldn't be noticeable at all.

This last picture is a few of the things I have found in the walls so far:

The bottom 2 items are toothbrushes that look very old, they appear to be made of bone or ivory. I just noticed some writing on one of them in the picture but I don't have them here, they are back at the Woodbury house. I will try to see what they say the next time I'm there.

The top item is a turned wooden spindle. These are the kind you normally see in a hallway or entryway as elaborate fretwork. We dont have any fretwork in the house, I have no clue how it got into an outside wall in the dining room.