It isn't entirely clear to me how you would go about restoring the wainscoting for an entire dining room. But I do have some experience attempting to restore a much smaller amount of woodwork.
Our home has a small hallway-ish room that connects the dining room to the 1st-floor bathroom, the back bedroom, and the basement. We call it the "mud room," and we use it for storing bags, books and papers, jackets, rain gear, etc.
The doorways of all the doors in the mud room had been painted over by some prior owner in a somewhat disgusting shade of really dark brown. At one point, I convinced myself that I'd strip the paint down to the original wood. How hard could it be?
Turned out to be REALLY BLOODY HARD.
I began by using a standard paint-stripper. I applied some to a cloth and wiped it up and down the wood. Typically, the paint will bubble up and then you can remove it using a scraper or steel wool.
This stuff bubbled up. But when trying to scrape it off, it would basically smear around. Turned out that there was another layer of tan color paint right under the brown paint.
This task took hours and hours. I confess I gave up on the work for months at a time. My wife was well and truly PO'ed (as she had every right to be, since I had left the mud room a total mess; at least the lead test indicated there was no lead in this paint).
Finally, when my wife was about 7-months pregnant, we hired some professional painters to paint our son's new bedroom. While they were at it, I asked if they could take a look at the mess I had made in the mud room. They agreed to help.
From my perspective, the good news was that this was NOT an easy job for the professionals either. It wasn't just me - this really was a nearly impossibly tough job! It took them almost an extra week to finish the task.
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