How to Lay Out Wainscoting in a Room With Windows

Decide on the type of wainscoting that you want to install. The two most common types of wainscoting are beaded boards and raised panels. Beaded boards are by far the easiest to install and require little layout. Just cut the boards that fall underneath the windows to a shorter length and continue adding them to the wall. Raised panel wainscoting requires more configuring than this.

Draw a diagram of the room on a piece of graph paper if you are planning to install raised panel wainscoting. Note the length of each wall, then the width and position of each window and each wall space between windows. For example, in a traditional living room with two windows in the wall, the wall length might be 160 inches, and the segmented lengths might be 40 inches of wall, 25 inches of window, 30 inches of wall, 25 inches of window and 40 inches of wall, totaling 160 inches.

Decide on a rough width for the panels you want to use and see if you can fit them into your segmented lengths. If you can't, you will have to make the panels under the windows a slightly different width to make the wainscoting look right. In the example given above, the panels would have to be 5 inches wide to fit the 25-, 30- and 40-inch spaces, but this is far too narrow for a wainscoting panel. A solution is to make three 10-inch panels for the 30-inch space, four 10-inch panels for the 40-inch spaces and two 12 1/2-inch panels for each of the 25-inch spaces under the windows.