Prefinishing and Installing Wainscoting

As I've developed ideas on this camper, I know I've mentioned a couple of times in a couple of different arenas, when I'm done I want this to look more like a living room, less like a camper. So, to that end, on these two walls, this one over here, and this one over here, notice that they're still unpainted. I've got some hardboard, some Masonite there that I filled in over here after I repaired that corner. I don't care what that looks like, 'cause I'm about to skin over the top of all of that stuff with what's called pine wainscoting. If you're not familiar with what that is, don't sweat it. I'm gonna show it to you in just a second out here. But what that's gonna do, I think, is gonna, it's gonna give these walls a really warm and cozy look in a really, really nice accent. That's gonna stand out then from the gray that's painted onto the surrounding walls. It just, it's just a cool way to give it some contrast. And of course, in a, in a cabin-y camper way, putting that pine on the wall is gonna be a neat way to go. One of the things we need to do is seal it. We need to finish it before it goes on the wall, because that's so much easier to do. So that's gonna happen outside of the camper. Let's head out there and I'll show you the wainscoting and the pre-finishing process. The finishing process that I'll go through before it goes on here. What the heck is pine wainscoting? This is it right here. Got this from a home center. And this is a bundle of wainscoting. When you get this, it's actually all shrink-wrapped together, and it'll say right on the package how many square feet this will cover. So what you need to do is look inside your camper, take some measurements, do some math and figure out how many square feet of this you're gonna need. That's the amount of material we want to pre-finish. Next let's have a look at the finish I'm putting on this stuff before it goes in. The product I'm using for the wainscoting is a water-based product. It's AquaCoat lacquer. Now, one of the things I wanted to point out here is I use this regularly in my shop. So I get it in a gallon jar. You can also get it in smaller containers if you're not gonna need this kind of volume, A couple things I like about this, it's water based. That's probably thing number one. So it's really, really easy, it's really, really easy to clean up when I'm done doing my work. The other thing, like I've said, I've used this on a lot of different projects, and the durability of this stuff is really, really good. It's easy to handle. For what we're doing here, I'm gonna be brushing it on. More on that in a second. If you've got a means by which to spray it, you can also very easily spray this stuff. To brush it on, you want to make sure you've got a synthetic bristle brush. That's gonna handle the best. That's gonna help the finish lay out the best. So I am stirred here. Stir crazy. And I think that leaves us ready to start putting it up. So let's hit on a couple of things here. It's gonna take more than one coat of finish in order for this to have enough protection on it. So, once this is dry, everything is gonna get lightly scuffed, sanded. I'll come back and show you that when this is dry and ready. Then it's gonna get another coat or two. The other thing that's worth talking about is let's look on the board over here. One of the ways that I put finish on is I brush it out, and then I come back and I do what's called tipping it, which is to take literally just the tip of the brush, like I'm doing right there, and pull that through the finish, pull that through the finish. So the way I think of it is that it's a little bit like a squeegee. So get some product on, then tip through it, tip through it. And then keep working your way up, get more product on, tip through it. And that's gonna help you optimize the surface finish that you get from the brush. Like I said, you're gonna scuff sand it after this. So, if off the brush at first coat, it's just a little nibbly, don't sweat it because the scuff sanding is gonna take care of it. From this point, oh, the other thing I was gonna say is, it's gonna take a lot more wainscoting than what you see in front of me right here. I set this up on saw horses just for the sake of showing you what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. But then there's quite a bit more of this. There are more bundles I need to unwrap, get on saw horses and just do more of the same so that I have enough product in order to cover the walls in there. So, we'll let this first coat dry. It's gonna take a couple hours, and then get back here and second coat it. Here's where we're at on this whole thing. Once that first coat is dried amply, then come back and clean it up just a little bit. You might feel some little nibs in it. It is a water-based product. So it's possible that it raises the grain just a little bit. So when you do some light sanding, you'll knock that back down. I like to do that with one of these. It's a Scotch-Brite type pad. This is a fine in the world of coarse, medium, fine. This is a fine. So just a few swipes over the top of that, and you'll clean that up. Once that's been done, once it's been scuffed, then you're ready for another coat, which is gonna go on exactly the same way I did the first coat. You'll notice there are a lot more boards laying here now than there were before. That's because I've got more parts out prepping stuff. It's so much easier to finish this while they're individual pieces than it would be if they were raw wood that went on, while the camper, trying to finish that. So this pre-finishing is really key. I'm gonna get these all cleaned up, get one more coat on them. And then they're gonna be ready to go inside. When you've got the finish on your material and you're ready to start coming into the camper with it, let me show you my approach to this. What I've got so far are pieces that are cut so that they'll fit into this space. And it isn't really these pieces that I wanted. What I wanted were the off cuts from the ends. The reason for that is having those small pieces I can dry stack them. Remember these are tongue and groove, so they'll engage and hang together like that. And what I'm looking for is how is this gonna end relative to the break in the wall right there? What you want to avoid with this kind of thing is ending up, let's say it looked like this right now. I'd really rather not have a tiny little, I don't know, three-quarter-inch wide, one-inch-wide piece that's finishing that. I'd rather it's closer to a full piece. And down at the floor, I can control that by how this starts down here. So, to make that happen, I need to see how it's gonna end up here. So what I'd really like to do with this is end up where, with this top piece I'm cutting, maybe just cutting the tongue off right there, and then that's gonna go away. So this stack isn't bad, keeping in mind that eventually there's gonna be a finished floor. There's gonna be some baseboard that goes on here. So there's a lot of latitude as far as where I start at the floor. That's what makes it worth having a look here to see how should I do this so that the final visual is good and I don't end up with a skinny little piece? So start with that like I'm doing. Then, once we've got that information at hand, we can actually start laying pieces in here. Before any wainscoting goes on the wall, let's talk about some tools of the trade. You're gonna need a way to cross cut the wainscoting to length. You're probably gonna need a way to rip some of it to width. And as we move further up and down the wall, you're gonna see the occasions where that has to happen. Of course cross-cut to length just to fit into this space. Had to do that already. I'm gonna be fastening the wainscoting to the wall with a 23-gauge pinner. I love these things. They're amazing. The nail that they follow, I hate to even call it a nail, or the nail that they fire, I hate to even call it a nail 'cause it's so small. That's why these are called pinners. Is incredibly small. It doesn't even have a head on it. So, as much as possible, I'm gonna try to mask where the brad, the nail goes. But even if it does have to go right through the face of the material, it's gonna be almost impossible to see that, 'cause the head on these is so tiny. So you can get those from home centers, variety of different places. It's gonna be driven by an air compressor. So, air compressor set up outside the camper. The other thing I'm gonna do with the wainscoting is I'm sort of gonna glue it in place. So I'm gonna have a hundred percent silicone caulk be run down the wall. And what that's gonna do is give me adhesion between the back of the wainscot and the wall itself, just to make sure that over time nothing can bounce loose as we're taking this thing down the road. Now, as these go on, as the wainscoting goes on, remember that you do have studs in the wall. There's one right there, and wherever possible, I'm gonna try to make sure that I hit a stud with whatever pins I use. So, hit those studs where you can. And of course that's the way to help secure it, too. So, with that, I think we're ready to actually start getting wainscoting on the wall. Now, often with wainscoting, what one would do is start at the bottom and get that first piece in place, tongue up, set the next one groove onto the tongue and keep working your way up. However, I'm gonna start at the top. And the reason is because we have that break in the wall right there. And I want to make sure that if I start at the bottom and my pieces aren't perfectly parallel to that break, then it's gonna be kerflooey when I get to the top. So, if I start at the break, I'm gonna know that I'm ending correctly. And it's just gonna make this a whole lot easier to do. And the pieces themselves are interchangeable, and what I mean by that is the profile is the same, it's concentric about the middle. So, if I do it this way or I do it this way, the material itself doesn't meld, because it's the same, top to bottom or bottom to top. It looks the same. Now what I did is I pinned across the top to hold that portion in place. Then, the way that you actually install this is you come down to the tongue, and we don't want to nail through the tongue. We wanna angle this up. So I'm going through the tongue, but not straight through the tongue. What I mean by that is we're gonna angle it up like this. If I go through the tongue, what that does is it puts the brad, the pin, even though it's nearly invisible anyway, it puts it in a spot where, once the next piece comes up, you can't see it. So you don't want to just willy-nilly nail this through the face any place you can avoid doing that. Now... we engage the groove on the tongue. Slide that up. Now, think about what's happening here. That tongue is already secured to the wall. So I don't need to put any pins or nails here at the top of the second piece because that's actually held to the wall by the tongue. So what we do now is make sure that it's pulled up tight. And then come down and hit the tongue again. And if you have any spots where the silicone is eking out, this stuff is pre-finished, of course. So, if you come back with a paper towel or a rag, or in this case, even my finger, it's gonna wipe off of there really easily, because they already got finish on there. If that was raw wood, instead of pre-finished, that caulk would be coming off way harder. So there's a gap between the subfloor and the wall. I've got that last piece slipped in there. And I brought this. 'Cause I figured I'd need it. There we go. Get that piece pulled out. And engaged. Now, when you get to this last piece we have no choice but to face nail, because we can't get to the tongue at this point. But if I hold it down here, that pin. Try and close. Yeah. I hold it down here. It will be below the point where the baseboard is gonna cover this. Grab a rag or a paper towel. Look for any squeeze out from that silicone. We don't want it to dry on there. Like I said, it will come off easy now. You definitely don't want it to dry. And that's our start. What a great look on that wall. Is next. Every camper is gonna be idiosyncratic when you're putting wainscoting in, as far as where you have to make your cuts, how you have to make your cuts. But let me walk you through this transition that's going on right here. What is happening is that this storage area is here. And this course, this row of wainscoting ended here, a little bit above that storage area. So the way I cracked this nut was I cut this piece to fit between the storage area in the corner, just like all the pieces below it. Then I cut this to length, to go from here to the opposite corner. And I rifted on the table saw to this height so that they match up. Now, a couple of things here. In this case, the top of the storage area is still gonna get trimmed out. So this piece is actually gonna end up completely covered. So I'm not that worried about it. What this does for me is it does put a seam right there. So where I'm going with this is that in your camper, if you get into a case like this, where a long piece would need a rift from it like this, doing it this way, even if it's not gonna get covered by trim, isn't a bad approach. You do end up with this little seam, but as long as your cut quality is good, you can see that when I pull that closed, that seam is virtually invisible. And it's easier to cut that as a separate piece than it is to cut this as a notch out of this piece. One long piece. The next thing, when this piece goes on, and it's not really ready to go on yet, but I just want to show you, it doesn't quite come up to the bottom of my window. And I'm okay with that, because in the end, when all the wainscoting is on, I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna trim the window separately. So I need to get this. I need to get the wainscoting close, but it doesn't have to be trimmed. It doesn't have to be cut right up to that black aluminum frame, again, because a piece of, another piece is gonna go over the top of this to finish trimming that out. So I just gotta get them close. So that puts me in a position where silicone on the wall, get this one pinned in place, silicone, get this one pinned in place. And then from there, just keep working up the stack. I'm ready to come up alongside the window here. And remember, because I'm gonna do trim later, I don't need to be absolutely perfect here, but we need to get close to this curve. So the question becomes, how do I get that curve on this chunk of wood? And here's a cool and easy way to do this. I've got a lead pencil, and there's a little lip right there. So on that lip, I'm basically coloring it in. And what I'm trying to do is leave graphite right on that aluminum lip. Then, get the piece in place, and being careful here that I'm seating it on the other course, but I'm not letting it tip back until I'm in the right spot, until I'm ready. So, there, it's seated. Then push. And... what that does is it transfers the graphite from this to this. So now I can take a jigsaw, cut that circle and it's gonna be right, because that's exactly transferred by that piece of aluminum. One of the things that's nice about a confined area like this is, this is a finite distance. I can precut a bunch of pieces, which means I'm set up now to cover a lot of real estate all in one fell swoop like this. I am just loving how this looks. I'm down to the last section here of wainscoting, and I've got the whole other wall down, worked my way from the bottom to the top, cut the last little piece under the cabinet that's on that far wall. So now I'm ready to just wrap this up and work my way up this last little bit. When you get to the end up here, I got a full-size piece, and then I got a partial to make up the difference right there at the ceiling. And a lot of times, and this is one of those times, the easiest way to do this is to put these two pieces together and put them in together. This piece is so close to the ceiling, I'm not gonna be able to diagonal through the tongue anyway, to shoot blind pins that I would normally do through the tongue. And I certainly won't be able to do that with this one. It doesn't even have a tongue on it 'cause it was cut. So, again, you know, play it by ear, but a lot of times the easiest approach is tongue and groove these now. And then do that as one big panel. And this is where these small flat bars are handy again. 'Cause that'll let me put a little pressure there. I can lever there to make sure I'm closing. And that last little wall is done. What do you think? I think that of all the stuff I've done in the camper so far, adding this wainscoting is my favorite upgrade. I love how this looks on these two walls. Now, your brain might be spinning with a couple of different things. Like, what's the deal here? We looked at this whole upper cabinet a long time ago, and you probably noticed, too, the panel from down here is missing, intentionally because I was waiting until the wainscoting was on. Now this panel can go in. And the reason for that is that, because of the wiring that's under here, this panel is gonna get screwed on, not stapled in. So, by screwing it on, if somebody ever, ever has to access that electrical, they can remove that. Now, with the face frame, it's gonna go from that wall to that wall. So I had to wait until the wainscoting was added to that wall before I could get the face frame up. So now that this part's done, I can wrap up those other things. And that's why this is still so unfinished looking at this point. Happy with the wainscoting, very happy with the, the way the AquaCoat product went on and the level of protection we're gonna get from this. And especially here where this is gonna be the sitting, dining activity, kind of an area. So having that good protection on that pine wainscoting is gonna be really, really, really important. I love it. Hope you try this in your camper.