Modern Fluted Chair Rail Wall Treatment

If you’re looking for a modern take on the more traditional chair rail wall treatment, look no further! I thought this modern fluted chair rail wall treatment deserved it’s own detailed post. I always appreciate a good tutorial!

As part of my January House to Home Project, we transformed our boys’ shared bedroom with a modern vintage feel. It was a lot of work packed into two short days, but my husband and I tackled it together and got it knocked out! Okay, let’s get to it.

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Choosing the Chair Rail Boards

It’s important to know that these boards are technically considered door and window casing trim boards. They come in 7′ boards. I looked and looked hoping to find some that were 12′ boards, so we’d have less cuts, but since doorways most commonly 7′, this is what you’ll likely find.

This is a roughly 11′ x 12′ bedroom. I bought eight 7′ boards, and only needed about five with all of the cuts. These were primed pine boards, and they ran $15 each at the time of my purchase (from Menards). You can read more about the cost breakdown here.

Since they were already primed, we just did two coats of SW Tricorn Black on them. This is a wonderful true black color, but it does have a softer tone to it. It’s kind of hard to explain, but I wouldn’t consider this at stark black, if that makes sense.

Fluted Chair Rail Installation

Once we had the upper portion of our walls and trim work painted white, we could move on to the fun part – installing this modern take on the traditional chair rail wall treatment!

Steps we took to install wall treatment

Used 4′ level to mark the bottom of the tape/stripe line; this line was at 40″ from the floor (not base trim).
Use painter’s tape to mark off the stripe, using the marked line as a guide for the bottom edge of the tape. We used this delicate surface FrogTape and love it! You can play with this a bit depending on how thick of a stripe you want to create.
Pro-tip: This is a key step to ensure crisp af lines: we run a very small bead of caulk (paintable) along the bottom edge of that tape to seal it off from any bleeding. Once on there, you can run your finger or a damp paper towel over it to wipe it smooth down onto the wall you’re going to paint on. This is the second room we’ve done this in and it works very well for color blocking.
Once the tape was on and sealed with caulk, I painted the bottom portion of the wall black. I took extra precaution for bleeding by running my roller down from the tape line first, making sure not to go above the tape line!

5. I needed two coats of the black to cover the wall.

6. Once the second coat of black paint was on I let it dry for a bit, but then made sure to pull the tape before the caulking got too set up. I would try to pull the tape within an hour or two of painting to avoid this.

7. And finally, we began installing the fluted boards. We removed the tape and the bottom edge of our boards sat right at the top of where our tape line was.

8. Eric made all of the cuts and helped get them nailed up while I took on the tedious task of touching up the (very minimal) bleeding that occurred. The trickiest cut was the bumped out corner between the boys’ closet and doorway because it was a mitered edge, and those are just difficult. But we got it done, and we’re still married. Ha!

9. Once the boards were up, we were essentially done. It was time to clean up and then accessorize!

Final Thoughts on this House to Home Project

We had a great time together over these two days. We work well together (the majority of the time) and these projects allow us to spend time together focusing on one end goal free of distractions. It’s such a good feeling to completely finish spaces – on our way to turning our house into a home. It’s good marriage therapy. 🙂

Overall, I love the look of this modern take on the traditional chair rail wall treatment. You can go so many directions with decor with this look; I’m already thanking myself from the future for sticking with neutrals that can grow with the boys!

If you have questions on how we did this chair rail, please drop them in the comments! Thanks for visiting today.

To the Chaos!

Modern Fluted Chair Rail Wall Treatment