we've just finished installing crown molding in this room and now it's time to get started on our chair rail installing chair rail is one of the easiest projects you'll ever do however this room is going to throw us a bit of a curveball so let's take a look at it because you may encounter the same challenge in your own home so here's the challenge typically you want to pick chair rail that isn't thicker than the existing door trim but I really want to use this FM 5538 molding because of its nice profile so we'll have to do some tricks to incorporate it into the door trim but it will look fantastic when we're done you'll show you how to get around this challenge later but first let's go over some basics for our project in order to determine how much moulding is needed we take measurements of each section of wall in the room we'll be sure to exclude any doorways closets and windows because we don't need material to cover these areas for this project we're going to use five of our eight-foot long sticks of molding to make the sixteen pieces needed for the full room before we make our first cut let's take a quick look at where the right side of our first piece is going to end at this radius corner with a corner like this we could turn it with a single piece however I prefer to use a small transition piece which leaves a smaller gap to caulk plus it adds more character to the room okay let's go outside and get to work for this project we'll be using the bevel feature of our compound saw all of our cuts will be made with our molding flat on the saw you can also install chair rail with just a standard miter saw to do so just position your molding flat against the fence like this the left end of our first piece butts up against our windows so no cut is necessary checking our cheat sheet with the right side going into a 135 degree corner with transition piece we'll set our bevel angle to 11 and a quarter degrees and we'll make our cut the leftover scrap from my first cut is just long enough for piece number three so let's go ahead and cut it both sides are going into a transition piece so we'll leave the bevel angle at 11 and a quarter degrees for the left side we're going to have the bottom of our chair rail against the fence and make the cut for the right side cut we'll flip it over mark our measurement cut it with the top of the molding against the fence okay now for piece number two the transition piece between one and three the bevel angle remains the same so we make the cut on the right side by holding the top of the molding against the fence and just cutting off a small sliver we'll flip our piece around and now position it with the bottom of the molding up against the saw mark it at one inch and make our cut the piece should look just like this with the front narrower than the back piece number four is identical so we'll just do the same thing all over again piece number five is a full length the left side will butt up against our transition piece so we're going to hold the piece with the bottom of the molding up against the fence and cut it at the same 11 and a quarter degree bevel angle the wall is longer than our molding so the right side of piece five will need to butt up against another piece the molding is very uniform so we just make a butt joint because it's easier and will look great when we're all finished to get a clean joint we're going to trim just 1/16 of an inch off the end with our bevel angle at zero degrees all right now let's head inside and install these five pieces before installing any of our pieces we mark on the wall where the top of our molding will come up to then just like our crown molding project we add adhesive on the back to reduce the number of nails needed which ultimately decreases the amount of finish work required we're using one and a quarter inch Brad's and we'll keep the PSI setting on our air compressor between 70 and 100 with adhesive on our first piece we press firmly to the wall align the top of the molding with our marks making sure our piece is level then shoot a nail in every 12 inches on our transition we're going to add adhesive on the edges that touch piece one and three and nail it in place we add adhesive to our third piece but it up against the transition align it to our marks and nail it in place don't worry about any gaps in your corners when we do our finish caulking and painting these will disappear we install our fourth piece the small transition and then install piece number five the final piece we need on this wall is 22 and 9/16 inches let's go back outside and cut this piece plus piece number seven the left side of p6 is going to butt up against piece five so we'll start by just cutting off a hair from the end to give it a nice clean joint the right side of this piece is going into an inside 90-degree corner looking at our cheat sheet we set our bevel at 45 degrees and the top of our molding should be up against the fence and we make our cut anytime you're going around an inside corner of a room the back of the molding should always be longer than the front and you can see some of the exposed profile that's how you know you're doing it right piece number seven is a full length the left side is going into that 90-degree corner so let's start by flipping the molding around so the bottom is touching the fence and we're going to make our cut all right now the right side will butt up against piece eight so we're going to set our bevel back to zero and we're going to cut off just a little slice so that we have a nice clean fit we add adhesive to pieces six and seven align the top of the moldings to our marks and then nail them in place we're ready for piece eight and if you remember the door trim is narrower than our chair rail see how some of the polyurethane is exposed so what we're going to do is extend part of the chair rail over the casing and then return it back into the door now let's go get the pieces cut and then you'll see what I mean let's start with the end of the chair rail that touches the door casing or door casing is five eighths of an inch thick so I'm going to put a mark at that measurement on our chair rail because we're only going to cut that deep into it we set our saw at the 45 degree bevel angle we position the molding flat on the saw with the bottom touching the fence and then just cut to our mark on the molding [Applause] now take a coping saw and cut from the back to remove part of the molding this allows you to slide it over the doorframe you can see now how our molding fits up against the doorframe there is a piece however that is still missing we'll cut that in just a moment but first mark piece eight where it will butt up against p7 and cut it to fit for the small return piece we'll have our sauce set at 45 degrees and just cut all the way through the molding then we'll set our bevel back at zero degrees we've measured our gap and it's 1/2 inch we're going to transfer that measurement over to our molding and make our cut this is it we can use just a little adhesive with our return in place and the piece is finished we use the same cutting process to make peace 9 peace 10 and peace 11 we're now at our bullnose corner to give this step a professional look use a small transition piece between pieces 12 and 14 from installing our crown molding earlier in this room we know that the transition piece for a 90-degree bullnose is 83% of the radius or in our case 5/8 of an inch for peace 12 measure to where the wall starts to curve and then add to that measurement half of the length of our transition piece or 5/16 of an inch we do this because piece 12 must extend beyond the curve before it hits our transition piece and we do the same thing when taking our measurements for piece 14 on the left side of piece 12 is an inside 90 degree corner so we're going to set our bevel angle at 45 degrees position our molding with the bottom touching the fence and we'll make our cut after marking our measurements on the molding we're going to make the cut on the right side of our molding which is for the outside 90 degree with bullnose we set our saw to the 22 and 1/2 degree miter angle we position our molding with the bottom touching the fence and we make our cut for our transition piece we keep the bevel at 22 and 1/2 degrees and make our first cut we then flip the molding over and cut it a second time the final size of the back part of the molding will be 5/8 of an inch our finished piece should look like this since it's for an outside corner the front of the molding will be longer than the back for piece 14 we repeated the process on the right side to make it wrap around the door trim now on the left side we'll cut it to length with our saw back at the 22 and 1/2 degree bevel angle now we align these three pieces and install them with adhesive and nails okay we've arrived at our final corner I've already cut the two pieces so let's take a look at them but the piece that touches the door trim we made that special cut on the left side for the right side it's going into a 90-degree corner so we just made a 45-degree bevel cut okay now our second piece has a 45 degree bevel cut on the left side because it's going into that 90-degree corner as well on the right side it's just a straight cut because it's flooding up against the window we nail these two pieces and we are finished and remember any gaps you might have we can clean up during the finish work in a room like this we had a lot of extra cuts because of our various corners and the thin door trim once you get accustomed to making the cuts a project like this will only take about two hours for the installation portion most simple rectangular rooms can be installed in less than an hour now for more how-to videos that will help you give your house an amazing new look using our unicorn moulding go to unicorn com you