Wainscot and Vanity Install

[jteneyck]

You might remember the wainscoting I was working on a couple of weeks ago.  Well, it's done, as is a matching vanity, and I started installing it yesterday.  I thought you might enjoy seeing where I'm at with it. 



This is a half bath, and measures about 53" W x 64" deep; not big.  In the photo above the vanity is on the left and you can see the toilet flange and its supply stub out to the right.   The toilet stub out was installed by the plumber and it was located right in the lower right corner of that panel.  It would have looked ugly had I left it there, so I moved it a couple of inches up and left so that the escutcheon will fit flat on the panel.  

Here's a little better shot of the vanity:



The porcelain  sink covers the top of the vanity completely.

The wainscot panels are screwed to the studs at the very top and bottom of the panels. The baseboard molding will cover the screws at the bottom and the molding at the top covers those screws, as shown here:





The cove molding under the cap molding was attached with adhesive caulk and pin nails.  The cap was installed with adhesive caulk, a few 18 gage brads, and a couple of trim screws.    Those get filled and then the cap will be get a finish coat of paint to cover them.  I cut biscuit slots in all the mitered joints and glued them in as I installed the cap moldiing.  I scribed the cap molding to the walls, but only where it made sense.  Where the walls where obviously out of plumb or wavy, I let the molding bridge over those areas.  The owner agreed to fill those areas with drywall compound to "straighten" the walls.  He needed to paint again anyway so he was OK with it.  If he hadn't been willing to do it I would have as it will just look better.  

As with any room, the walls weren't flat or plumb, but they were reasonably square.  I shimmed behind them, as needed, to keep the panels flat as I screwed them in place.  Where the panels but one to another, I screwed them together through the bottom cutouts and at the top with a screw diagonally through top of the stile of one panel into the stile of the adjacent panel.  That kept all the screws hidden. 

Tomorrow I will install the baseboard panels and it'll be done.  I'm going to have to use a few brads through the face of them but there are few convenient alternatives.  They will get filled/painted like the cap molding.  

Thanks for looking. 

John

[AztecKing]

John,

Thanks for sharing this build. I love what you did here and it really classes up the room. I assume you built and painted these panels off site?  Can you give a little more info on what materials you used?

Jeff

[atgcpaul]

Great stuff, John.  I forget if this is in your house or a clients.

Can you also post a link to your other thread?

Thanks,
Paul

[jteneyck]

Here's a link to the first thread.  Paul, I built this for a guy who has a house about 90 years old in a pretty nice section of Niagara Falls.  He says you can actually leave your doors open w/o worry, which is very hard to imagine. In any case, it's a nice neighborhood.  Jeff, I used maple and maple plywood for the wainscot and vanity.  I built them in my shop and sprayed them with BIN pigmented shellac primer and then BM's Advance paint.  The drawer was finished with EnduroVar and rides on KV soft close undermount slides.  The vanity doors close with Blum hinges. 

I pretty much finished the installation today.  This is a shot of the baseboard molding where I wrapped it around the vanity. 




The left piece against the wainscot panel is butted against the vanity.  The middle section, on the side of the vanity, is coped at the left end and mitered on the right.  The piece under the vanity is mitered, and then the little piece with the gap on top of it is a return that I cut off to fill the top section of the miter, before I glued it in.  The bottom had to be tapered, too, to accommodate the pitch of the floor.  A lot going on in that area.  My original design had the baseboard going right out to the end of the vanity with a recessed toe kick.  I decided that would just be a trip hazard so I changed the design to what you now see so that people can swing their feet in/out in front of the vanity w/o tripping.  It doesn't look quite as nice now, but function trumps form.  

Here's that section of the job, with the sink just sitting on the vanity so you can see what the guy chose and how it fits with the wainscoting.   



The holes in the floor are where two pipes came up through the floor to a radiator along that wall.  The guy has to patch in the floor and then cut new holes and plumb in the radiator. 

Working to the back of the room, here's what the final product looks like. 



The plumber came while I was there today and installed the sink and toilet shutoffs.  They are sweat soldered to the copper stub outs.  As he was about to light up his torch I said to him "You aren't going to burn my paint, right?".  He stopped w/o saying a word, went and got a piece of sheet metal and fit it around the pipes, then soldered the valves on w/o incident. 

Somehow, I didn't make a panel for the wall section to the right of the door.



I don't think the owner asked me to, but maybe I forgot.  So we decided to just install some baseboard molding for now to cover a hole at the bottom, plus a piece of shoe molding (not cut to length yet)  to cover a gap to the tile.  He'll paint the wall and live with it over the Winter.  If he just hates it I'll make a panel for that wall.  Installing it will be a pain, as I will have to remove all the moldings to do so, but so be it. 

I'll try to get a couple of beauty shots after he gets everything done.

John

[Window Guy]

That turned out really nice, great job.



Steve

[AztecKing]

It turned out great!  Thanks for the info. 

Jeff