Beat the Clock
With the tile down and the grout sealed, I was ready to start installing the wainscoting. Remember, guests are due and I want to get the upstairs sink and toilet installed so that there are two facilities in the house. I don't want to install these fixtures temporarily for the sake of our friends' visit. I want to use their arrival as an incentive to get this job done.
The wainscoting had to go in before I could install the fixtures, and before I installed the wainscoting, I had trim out the windows and door.
In trimming the window I decided to make the "stop" the full width of the jamb. This served to cover the jamb, which was in pretty rough shape, and its extension which I had added some time back to make up the difference in the thicker wall. (See: Window Jamb Extensions - March 1) The problem with this approach is that if/when I have to remove the window sash, I'll have to pull out a large piece of the trim which won't be as easy as removing a narrow window stop. But overall, with the gnarly jambs encased, the trimmed window will look a lot neater.
Doing this kind of finish work ranks with the more satisfying tasks in the renovation project. It's a nice mix of thought and handiwork that goes into getting a pleasing result. One of the drawbacks of my current situation is that the power saws are out in the driveway. That means having to be extra careful with my measurements unless I want to be making several long trips for a single cut.
With the windows trimmed, I was ready to get started on the wainscoting. I decided to concentrate on finishing the walls behind the toilet and sink first, then if I had time, I would continue with trimming out the door and adding wainscoting to the remaining walls.
The challenge with the wainscoting was deciding how to mount it. On the exterior walls there is 1x3 strapping behind the plasterboard but not all in convenient places for mounting the wainscot boards. The wall studs are over 2 inches deep from the surface of the wall because of the sandwich of plasterboard, strapping, and rigid insulation, so reaching those as anchors was out of the question. The recommended method is using construction adhesive, but I wasn't sure how that would bond with the veneer plaster. (Back when I was plastering, if I had known I was going to use wainscoting I probably wouldn't have plastered that section of the wall.) I decided to go with a combination of construction adhesive and nails in the spots where I was certain there was strapping behind the plasterboard.
After the wainscoting was up I was ready to cap it with some bull-nosing and coping trim and then install the baseboard. Next up, the toilet and sink go in.
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