Not only are we having a baby, but our best friends Shannon and Dom are having one less than a month before us! Yaaay, you get two nurseries for the price of one in a way 🙂 So this weekend we headed over to their house to help them install a chair rail in their nursery. We’ve only done one chair rail install ourselves and that was in our entryway a few months ago, but we were more than willing to help them out. Our entryway was actually more complicated and larger than their room, so the process was pretty simple this time around.

We were the brains, the boys offered the brawn.

Very important to this process this time around was our brand new nail gun. We picked up this small pneumatic nail gun while it was on sale at Lowe’s a couple of months ago. We paid about $75 for it (which I think we put some of on a gift card) and it was worth every penny. The compresser was nice and small, light and not very loud at all.

We knew this was a smart investment because we have plenty of other molding plans up our sleeves (including our own nursery) and our previous nail gun was electric. It weighed a ton and wasn’t powerful enough to shoot the nails all the way through the molding, so we had to go back and hammer them in. Not only does this thing fully sink in nails, the compresser can be used to inflate tires. Who knew? 🙂

The rest of the process we pretty much explained in our entryway post. Please excuse the inconsistently weird colors in these pics, they were taken at night.

We didn’t caulk or paint it, but at least you can see all of our cuts and nail holes 🙂

We also got a chance to add my favorite little part of a chair rail to this room… the end pieces. We once again just glued them on (I wasn’t putting my finger on that small piece of molding and shooting it in!) and held them in place with some tape while they dried. We didn’t have any painter’s tape on hand, so plain ol’ Scotch it was!

They haven’t done anything else to the room yet (it’s not staying yellow), but the uncaulked, unpainted chair rail already makes such a difference!

Mike and I looove all sorts of molding and we don’t mind installing it either. Painting is another topic for Mike, he hates painting. With our new nail gun, we’re looking forward to finishing up our entryway, molding out the baby’s room and making some built-in things. Hopefully we can start planning all of that soon because our new flooring has been delivered and is set to be installed next week! 🙂

Please excuse the iPhone picture, but this is literally the third time since we’ve lived here (which has only been a year and a half) that we’ve had boxes of flooring in our living room. Okay twice was because we wanted it, once was the builder’s fault, but hopefully this is it for us and we can get to decorating some new rooms! 🙂

ps- As I was searching through my old chair rail posts, I re-read this one from July 11th when we painted the bottom half of our entryway wall. It also happened to be the day we found out Darwin has cancer, so reading it nearly broke my heart all over again. BUT, in a happy way. Everything written that day, that he lost even more weight, that he had lost more than 75% of his kidney function, has been reversed. As of Sunday, Darwin finally broke into the 7lb range (7lbs 3oz at that!) and has begun to regain some of his muscle mass. I felt sick on Sunday so when he came back from the vet with Mike and happily trotted over to me on the couch, I was the proudest momma in the whole world 🙂

Tags: chair rail, nail gun, nursery