Wallpaper and panelling for the WAHM dining room

This is what the dining room in the William and Mary House looks like this morning :) I worked SO hard yesterday on panelling and wallpapering and so forth (and I have the gluey, stain smeared fingers to prove it :) and I've taken some photos to show the steps I went through.

I started by cutting a chimney breast for the fireplace and wrapping it in wallpaper.  I had stained the plywood to wainscot height (about 3"), thinking that I could build the panels right onto the plywood for the two side walls and onto basswood for the back, foam wall.  It looked like crap -- big, ugly plywood grain, so I decided to use basswood for all three walls.  I was lazy, and didn't want to cut the 4" wide basswood strips I had, so I decided to have slightly higher wainscotting than is usual :)

For the back wall I cut a length of basswood sheet to fit, roughly centred the window and cut a little slot in the sheet for the window and glued the window to the sheet. Then I put in the chair rail, rather roughly coping it around the sill.  I used some 1/4" moulding I found at my local building supply store (so it's cheap) for the chair rail, and I'm pleased with the way it looks.   Here's its profile:

The above photo shows the basswood sheet covering the plywood and the chair rail going on by the door and along the side of the fireplace mantle (to tie the fireplace in with the panelling).  The green tape, by the way, is covering the gawd-awful gouge where I made a bish of cutting out the door hole with my new Trio, hem hem).

Now the wallpaper can be stuck on!  Look, ugly green tape disappears!

The back panelling isn't stuck on yet, of course, because it will be more tidy to wallpaper that wall first and then stick on the panelling.  But I've added a very simple baseboard (about 1" wide and very thin -- just pine offcuts) and very simple uprights (stir sticks, actually :).  My Easy Cutter is getting a work out!

They tell you to stain your woodwork first for a reason :)  I had to be really, really tidy around the wallpaper on the left side because I did the panelling first and then stained it. 

I cut out the hole for the window and then test fitted the rear panelling -- all seems well.

I then applied the wallpaper to below the line of the panelling and glued it on, cutting out the window.  Do not use Quick Grip glue on polystyrene, by the way -- it eats it :)  PVA is fine.  There was some bubbling of the wallpaper that worried me at first, but it dried nice and flat.

Still needs some touch ups, but it's pretty close.  I was on some bizarre high from getting all this done, so I decided to so some wiring, which of course has to be done before everything is glued in place if it's on an interior wall.

I drilled holes through the chimney breast for the two sconces and the fire. The wires will run up the back of the chimney breast (which will be stuck on with Museum Putty and along a channel at the top of the wall to the back and the plug board.

Here's the fireplace with sconces, fire, a large Raphael over the mantle and some blue and white pieces. This fireplace came with a barewood hearth -- I cut some faux stone sticky tile to fit rather than marbling it myself with paint.

And here's the window area.  While my hands were covered with Mission Oak stain, I decided to stain this little sideboard as it was going to live here anyway (I decided on the window placement so that it would clear the sideboard, actually).

I also did some work on the stairway, but I'll share that later because I'm going to be posting fairly infrequently over the next three weeks.