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Installing Wainscotting Decorative Molding Tutorial Part 4 of 9



How to build and install wainscotting constructed from decorative molding

Installing the picture frames:Calculating the dimensions continued.

For this example I'm going to assume that we are installing a picture frame without the border; however, If I get email requests for pictures frame dimensions with the border I'll simply add the information to this document.

Now, let's start with our initial wall length of 100". Assuming that we want to install 4 picture frames we have a total of 5 spaces between and around the frames.
Frame Space

Picture frames spacing looks great at 4 inches but I have witnessed installations ranging from as low as 3 inches to as high as 7.5 inches. Guess what… in all cases they look incredible. Just ensure that you have roughly the same spacing throughout a single room.
Based on a spacing of 4" and the fact that we are installing four picture frames, we're going to use up (4" * 5) = 20 inches of wall space just for the spaces. That leaves us with 100" (length) -20"(space) = 80" of real estate for the picture frames themselves.

We are going to install four picture frames so that means that each picture frame should be 80"/4 = 20" inches wide! A piece of cake, huh? Now let's move on to the height. First let's calculate the amount of blank space. There will clearly be one space on the top of the frame and one space on the bottom of the frame. Assuming you'd like a consistent spacing around the frame, let's use the same 4" spacing that we used for the horizontal space between the frames. Accordingly, the total height of the frames is 26" (Height) - 8" (4" space * 2 spaces) = 18". So there you have it. We need four picture frames that are 20" wide and 18" high.

Frame Heights