HandyMan and I decided to tackle the dining room first. Our plan was to add wainscotting to the walls which is a good DIY home project for beginners.

The dining room is a fair sized room, 11x14, we're not tearing down any walls or anything, and it would a be a good room to try out our new power tool prowess on. Oh how I love wedding registries! We got most everything we asked for on our Canadian Tire registry - our mobile table saw, sander, drill, nail gun (HandyMan's favourite new toy), and the router (my favourite new toy). I've already got a long list of things I want to build with these tools!

Here's the steps we followed for this dining room renovation and installed DIY wainscotting for beginners:

1. To prep the room, first remove the wallpaper. Lucky for us, there was only two layers and those came out fairly easily with the wallpaper steamer we rented. Who knew though, that old plaster walls + hot steam = big crumbly patches of plaster. Oh well, good excuse to practice our plastering skills. 
2. Create a CAD drawing, figuring out the dimensions of each panel. Because our walls were in such bad shape, we decided to attach flat pieces of hardboard to the wall as the base. This way, we would not need to replaster the areas where the wallpaper took off the drywall. Our new nail gun sure made that an easy job! 
3. Cut MDF strips (ours were 4" wide out of 1/2" mdf) for the vertical and horizontal panels. Install panels with a nail gun.I requested a little mitred corner on each end of the verticals just to add some interest. 
4. Cover all seams and gaps with DAP. Sand down then paint with two coats of primer and a coat of paint. We used Benjamin Moore paint in "Distant Grey".