Wainscotting: whaddaya think?

[T42]

I'm going to panel a bit of the hall and the short corridor into the kitchen, to cover up where the dogs had their way with it.  It'll be 3 panels to aound elbow height with stiles & rails in oak surrounding poplar plywood panels stained to match.  The basic idea is to have top rail & baseboard running the full length, with the stiles butted in between and held with biscuits.

My problem is how to do the internal edges of the framework.  I can do it in two ways:

1. put it all together then take a router with a profile bit round it
2. put it all together then add picture-frame beading

1. would look a bit like this (if I used red pine & okoume and was a bit careless):



Pro: quickest to do
Con: other woodworkers would look and say 'lazy bugger'.

2. would look like this, except that the joint between stile & rail would be horizontal, it wouldn't be dusty (ahem) and the mitre wouldn't be so sloppy:



Pro: nice square corners, looks more interesting
Con #1: hard impossible to find oak beading, and making pine look like oak is a bit hit & miss.  Might find obeche if I'm lucky.
Con #2. Higher profile: dogs & humans are going to be rubbing along it.

So I'm asking for opinions: do you think option #1 would be acceptable, given that the hall is pretty dark, or should I go for option #2 and go on looking for beading?

There's a 3rd option, BTW, which is to buy a profile/counter-profile router bit set, but having forked out for the oak my budget is null.

[spesh]

Not much of a woodworker (beyond having fitted a new balustrade at home), but my gut instinct is to go for option 1. If the hall is pretty dark, why go to more effort that you absolutely have to?

If other woodworkers look at it and go "lazy bugger",well, bof!

[Kim]

Seconded, on the basis of dogs.

[The French Tandem]

I love the clean and simple look of plain wainscoting with no beading at all. It's easier to make, customers are happy with the lower price tag! If you really prefer beaded panel, my two pence worth opinion is:

option 1: Forget about that. Do you really want to trade a few hours of extra work for a lifetime of regrets? This kind of work is the hallmark of early 20th century mass-produced furniture. Your house certainly deserves something better! 

option 2: This is the proper way to do it, except that you do not need to  buy any ready-made beading. If you have access to a router table or spindle moulder, you can machine your beadings right into the rails and stiles. Then a careful and precise mitre cut and you are done! If I'm not clear enough in my explanation, an image is worth a thousand words:




I assume you can read french, so try to google "ravancement de moulure" for a lot of other examples.

Cheers
A

[T42]

Read it, write it, make speeches in it... I sold my big combinée in 2013 when my back & shoulders were too messed up to haul flitches of oak around any more - it had been standing around almost unused for >10 years - and the toupie went with it.  I still have a couple of routers and a home-made table, cutter diam limited to ~35mm - not really enough for anything bombastic. The width of the moulding in pic #1 is about it.

I agree re option #1, though: we were given a locally-produced (& distinctly uncheap) wardrobe where the doors are done properly, but the animal that did the drawer-fronts just routed round them and I said "hah!" as soon as I saw them.

I don't think I have the energy or the precision these days to produce joints like the one you show by hand.  What I'm thinking is to cut my own beading in stages, and do a parclose/corniche assembly using an old stock of pearwood. Pearwood will stand up to just as much abuse as oak, and the projection would be less than a centimetre so dogs wouldn't be too much of a problem. I'd have to finagle the stain but I'll have to do that anyway for the centre panels.

If I get to doing the staircase as well I'll get the profil/counter-profile bits I mentioned.

[The French Tandem]

Aargh!! Sorry to read that!  If you do not have a spindle moulder anymore, I think the easiest way to do wainscoted panels is to start with flat panels, and square rails and stiles. This is an example of something I have done a few years earlier in cedar (sorry for the poor quality of the photo):

P_20190916_115242 by AR, on Flickr


The rails and stiles are held together by biscuits. That's sturdy enough since the whole thing is securely screwed to the wall. Everything can be machined with a table saw, planer and thicknesser, and biscuit jointer, no need for a router table/spindle moulder.

If you don't like the aesthetics of square rails and stiles, you can always nail a moulding all over the edges. I would not use pearwood if you want it to looks like oak. Pearwood is excellent for imitating ebony (with black stain) but pearwood grain is very different from oak. If you really cannot source proper oak mouldings, some african woods like framiré will do a better job.

[T42]

The cedar's nice.  I'll have to think about plain square edges - it'd certainly make life easier. Ditto framiré, although a google for framiré Haguenau gets me a somewhat confused response.

Just back from a ride & not compos mentis yet.  I'll get back to this tomorrow. Oh - another fun consideration is that it can't be assembled and varnished in situ, since the dogs will be back & forth all day. I'll need to build & varnish it entirely in the workshop then cart it over, then probably mastic the whole thing to the wall. Using beading would allow me to use screws or nails into whatever the wall is made of - half-timber with beams in phunny places and god-know-what in between - and then cover the heads up. Anyway, mañana.

[The French Tandem]

On my photo above, all the screws are concealed behind the chair rail and baseboard, so you don't need a beading for hiding the screws.

Ditto framiré, although a google for framiré Haguenau gets me a somewhat confused response.

I would happily let you make a few miles of oak beading on my spindle moulder, but you'll have to pay a visit to les gens de l'intérieur. Well, that's what they say in Alsace, isn't it?

[Aunt Maud]

TFT's joint is called a masons mitre and is the correct way of joining wainscot.

Get an ogee bit on your hand held router and run up the moulding on the stiles and rails and cut the mitres when you join it together, draw bore the joints to make it tight.

You might even be able to get a cutter which cuts the groove at the same time as the ogee moulding. I'd make it all at the bench and just stick it onto the wall afterwards.

[T42]

Thanks, folks. Food for thought - I'm going to ruminate a bit longer.  I'm beginning to like TFT's square edges, for aesthetic as well as practical reason's.

Les gens de l'intérieur: I've also heard la vieille France.  I just call it France when I want to irritate the missus. "I went to France" when I come back from a ride does it every time.  Of course, Lorraine is a bit of a no-man's-land.

[Aunt Maud]

I'd have a little practice paring the mitre with a large bench chisel. If you mark the mitre with a knife instead of a pencil, you'll have a very accurate gauge to work to.

I read somewhere that woodworkers don't like to practice, which is true in my case, although it's something I'm trying to correct in my attempt to become more accurate with joinery.

[T42]

I usually use a scribing point for marking out, but I wouldn't mind treating myself to a nice marking knife...

I used to spend a long time at the drawing-board and do test pieces back when I was making furniture & such, but since my woodworking hiatus I've become much more reluctant to start and then impatient to finish.  This bit of panelling will be the first job of any size I'll have done in almost 20 years.  I wish I had my old Lurem back.  I started feeling sad as soon as it went out the door.

[The French Tandem]

If you mark the mitre with a knife instead of a pencil, you'll have a very accurate gauge to work to.

Agreed, as long as you are young and have a perfect sight. With my ageing eyes, I tend to prefer a less accurate pencil mark that I can see, rather than a more accurate knive mark that I cannot see!

[T42]

You can always use the knife & fill the mark in with pencil or chalk.

[T42]

How do you reconcile using a marking knife with "measure twice, cut once"?  You have to mark off the first measurement to be able to check it, but once you've done it with a knife the wood is already cut.

Mark it in pencil, check it and then score it with the knife?  Fiddly.  FWIW I just marked out & checked upright spacings and biscuiting points on my rails then found a calculation error that threw everything off.  If I hadn't done it in pencil I'd be shunkied.

[The French Tandem]

Maybe it means measure twice, score once?

On complex fitting jobs that needs precision, I sometime cut a piece of scrap wood to length + 1cm.  I try to fit the scrap wood, and chop a little bit again and again until the fit is perfect, then I cut the real wood to the same length.