Crown Molding (the wrong way)

We finished repainting the bedroom and realized it would look a lot better with a spot of crown molding. This is not something I’d done before and I can’t say I was particularly good at it (see later pictures) but paint hides a multitude of things and it ended up looking alright.

General

Our local hardware store (Rona) sells crown molding in 3 sizes, roughly 3”, 4” and 5”. Since we had no idea what would look best I brought one piece of each to try out. Which basically meant me holding up a piece and asking the missus ‘What about this one?’ repeatedly. for future reference we picked the 4” one.

The basic procedure is

Prime
Cut to length
Shape the ends
Nail to wall and ceiling (use trim nails)
Cover mistakes with poly filla
Sand
Caulk top and bottom (our walls are not straight and there were largish gaps)
Paint

It went quicker than I anticipated. A few evenings to prime the wood, a weekend’s worth of work to get it all up and then a few evenings of sanding, caulking and painting.

Straights

First of all, buy the longest sections of molding that you can, so you don’t have to join two pieces together. We have a car that only handles 8’ lengths so sadly not an option for us.

The idea is to cut each end at a 45 degree cut so one piece overlaps the other. You should try and make the joints as tight as possible.

Here’s one of my joints and you can see this one is not tight and not even lined up very well.

(The green tape marks the where the studs where, so I knew where to put the nails.)

Here’s a close up of that marvellous joint. You can clearly see the two pieces mis-aligned and all the places I missed with the hammer and hit the molding. Plus the triple holes where I imagined the stud to be.

Luckily for us there exists polyfilla and sand paper. After a bit of work the joint looks like this and is ready for painting. The best plan is to get it right in the first place!

Corners

The first part is easy, just cut the piece to finish in the corner.

The next piece should be cut at a 45 degree angle and then coped to fit. I’ll leave the details to the experts, for instance the Family Handy Man website. Suffice to say I mucked this up big time. Of the four corners I did only the last one was any good. Here’s the first attempt. Ouch.

Again we will use the magic poly filla to smooth out the wonky bits until its ready to paint.