Living Room Work Continues

For August and I, this whole house renovation process is basically about answering our own questions like:

• "Can we scrape popcorn ceilings?" (yes)
• "Can we install a whole house fan?" (yes)
• "Can we keep a landscaped yard looking nice?" (several things are dying... more on that later...)

So now we're at "Can we install crown molding?". We attempted it once before at my grandparents house. Including my dad, that makes 3 engineers, we didn't even get one junction to work right in several hours. We ended up paying to have it done by professionals. Later we realized that we didn't have the ideal saw, and on top of that, the one we had was broken and also missing a piece. This time we at least had the right tools: fancy Dewalt compound miter saw and angle measure. It still took us about 8 hours just to hang the stuff. Here are some tips we discovered:

- Measure corners, they are probably not square. Divide this angle by two for exterior corners. For interior, divide the measurement by 2 but cut the complementary angle... That's 46 degrees for a 92 degree corner, which we had several of.
- If you are going to have joints in a long stretch, make them near the corners, because its waaaay easier to manuever a smaller section into a corner. Of course, avoid joints if at all possible.
- Try fastening the corner pieces together on the ground, especially if you have wavy walls and out-of-square corners.
- Get a good stud finder and mark those studs before hand. Its hard enough to hold the molding and the nail gun over your head. Don't complicate the issue by trying to find the studs at the last second.
- Choose painted molding. That way you can make some mistakes, caulk and repaint them, and no one will be able to tell the difference. Case in point: Franken-corner. Here's a good shot of him:

We fought this corner for quite some time, as you can see. Definitely the worst of the worst. However, a little caulk, some fresh paint, and voila:


So the moral of the story is: yes, we can install crown molding, provided we can caulk the fool out of it. If you get right up on it, you can of course still see the mistakes, but from regular eye level, it looks flawless. We are majorly indebted to the inventor of caulk.

Let's take a look back at that check list. We are getting there! orange peel ceilings -> paint ceilings -> paint ceilings again? -> 2nd coat of paint on walls -> hang crown molding -> paint bay window -> install recessed lighting -> pull up carpet!! -> install new mantel -> install baseboards and quarterround