You’ll Hardly Believe it’s the Same Archway!
This is Dave’s foyer before he got all ambitious with the moldings.
Archives For Molding Before & Afters
All before and after pictures in the molding design gallery.
Your dining room can be set apart from the rest of the open floor plan with wainscoting.
This is the dining room/kitchen of a typical, early 1970′s style ranch home.
The challenge decorating this kind of open floor plan is: how do you decorate in such a way as to set the “dining room” area apart from the utility part of the kitchen without loosing the unity of the open floor plan?
The obvious answer is — with moldings!
A ho-hum kitchen corner.
Before installing the large, Greek Revival style baseboard on this outside corner of our kitchen, it was nothing more than a corner.
But now it’s a an architectural feature in and of itself!
Step by step instructions showing you how we installed and painted this historic baseboard are all right here: BASEBOARD-110.
Or you can read more about our kitchen molding makeover here: Our Kitchen Molding Makeover.
Or read about our whole townhouse project at Our Molding Makeover.
Nice crown molding above, but not so nice fireplace mantel below.
Big is no substitute for a lack of the proper details that make up all the parts of a fireplace surround.
This one is missing capitals and base on the fluted pilasters.
In addition, the frieze is disproportionately tall and the crown molding is too weak for the size of the mantel top.
But this is the kind of thing a builder asks the trim carpenter to install — even in expensive homes like this one — only because it can be built in an hour or less (read, cheap).
But after I installed a large, three-piece crown molding in this great room, the home owners were ready and willing to install a new fireplace surround. Take a look at what I came up with.
The bland, white wall with experimental red paint.
This is the wall that introduced Jennifer to the joy of moldings.
Every time she came or went she passed this vast expanse of white wall.
I told her I’d paint it whatever color she wanted, and if she didn’t like how it turned out, I’d just paint it again, and again and again until she’s absolutely in love with the foyer wall.
Her idea was to paint it a bold red, and my idea was to install a picture rail molding so she could easily rearrange her artwork when the mood struck her.
Do you like how it turned out?
Mom and Dad’s window sans the puffy, 1980′s style fabric valance.
When my mom and dad asked if I’d like to paint their small, tasteful bungalow, I couldn’t resist adding a few moldings at the same time.
Mom, a talented seamstress, was going to throw away her old fabric window valances she made, and so I made her these Craftsman style valance boxes to replace them.
I painted the valance frieze a slightly darker taupe color than what I put on the walls.
Those of you who are better with color than I am, so just think of all the other color combinations you could come up with for the valance box.
Early 70′s ranch homes were fashioned after the post-modern architectural ideals of the time.
Lucky for us that means they’ve left us with millions of rooms so ill-defined of any kind of style that now you and I can come along and impose on them our own decorating style with ease.
The world is full of “blank slate” rooms like these for us to decorate!
Do you like the valance box all white?
[This is part of Our Kitchen Molding Makeover series]
Jennifer thought she’d like the frieze painted the same blue as the kitchen walls, and the ornate onlay painted white. So I painted them for her.
Which one do you like better?
A kitchen with high ceilings like this needs a crown molding that doesn’t look wimpy.
The reaction you want when people look up is, “Wow, look at the crown molding!” not “Hmm, crown molding.”
I think we achieved the wow-factor we were looking for in this large kitchen.
About the Room
- The period style is Victorian.
- Ceilings are 9′ high
- The crown is made from stacking four separate pieces of molding.
- The baseboard is made from stacking three pieces together.
- Molding paint color is Benjamin Moore’s, White Dove, #OC-17.
- Wall paint is Benjamin Moore’s, Muslin.
A bland wall niche.
Everything you put in your niche — flower, statues, found-art objects — will look prettier when they are framed with moldings!
They are so easy to decorate with some simple moldings from your local lumber yard, and are especially suited for adding a few ornate architectural details, like this one.
The trick to decorating a wall niche with moldings is to treat it like a window surround. The only thing extra I added to this one that you wouldn’t add to a window surround is the 3-1/2″ tall baseboard molding on the bottom inside.
If the paint job the painters did on this hallway wasn’t so sloppy, I would have taken pictures of the finished niche.
Left side of split staircase.
This was the first and last stain-grade molding project I ever installed — oak wainscoting on a split-level staircase.
All of the these pictures show the wainscoting I installed before it was stained and sealed by some very talented painters. When they were finished, it matched the old oak baseboard and wainscoting perfectly.
The contractor who installed these double French doors leading to the patio did an awful job installing the simple door trim around it.
The fit and finish of the trim was the worst I’d ever seen in my life. So I had to do something about it.
These doors lead to the lush, flowery shaded patio, and deserved far better moldings to mark the transition.
The resulting door surround is DOOR TRIM-133.
It was such an easy style to install that I didn’t bother taking installation pictures of it.
This living room and foyer have ten foot high ceilings, and we gave them a total molding makeover and a high-resolution paint job that helped show off that height.
All of the molding patterns were based on designs I’d seen in rural Victorian era homes all over the U.S. and Canada. And since this is also a rural farmhouse — though not an old one — I thought it proper to install moldings that would not be out of place if this new farmhouse was on-hundred years older than it is.
In the picture below I’ve installed, primed and caulked, a whole bunch of moldings in this tall room. If I still had the before picture of this room, you’d see just a big box with tiny trim and a whole lot of potential.
During…
This room had the perfect geometry to decorate with a full compliment of moldings.
The first time I walked into this room I knew exactly what moldings I wanted to install.
Note my sketches on the wall around the left opening.
Look at this intersection of tray ceiling, HVAC box in the corner and two doorways.
If ever there were a case for improvising when decorating with moldings, this is the precedent setting example right here.
How in the world does one design moldings around this mess?
