No room is finished without baseboards and properly installed window and door casings. Finishing a room off with crown molding raises it to a whole new level. When deciding on trims, including crown molding, baseboard and door and window casings for your home, you need to consider your whole home - not just an individual room. Your trim should be consistent through out your home. Even if you will be remodeling your home one room at a time, take the time to create an overall trim plan for your home. Stick with one family of trim profiles for a harmonious look.

Trim and Crown Molding Materials

Wood:
Crown made from wood is milled or carved and is available in innumerable designs. Crown molding, especially ornate wood crown, requires a finish carpenter that specializes in this kind of trim work because installing and coping is so challenging.

Plaster:
Plaster moldings come in some very elaborate profiles. There advantage over wood is that they don't shrink or contort. Plaster moldings can be very expensive because the moldings are custom made for each room. Don't attempt to install these on your own. They need to be installed by a professional.

MDF (medium density fiberboard):
MDF is a great alternative to wood trim because it is cheaper and lighter and it still comes in a variety of stock profiles. This molding choice must be painted.

Crown Molding

Luxury home with high ceilings have a classic, yet dramatic elegance when they are crowned with a multi-layered cornice. However, you don't have to be royal to have crown. Even simple crown molding can give rooms with standard height ceilings an architectural upgrade.

Built up crown profiles are not just the simple installation of one piece of trim. Elaborate cornice is often the compilation of five to seven pieces! In order to achieve the final design of complex crown the components may include plywood cleats, plywood blocking, soffit, fascia, friezes, ceiling friezes, beds, coves and crown.

This kind of work surely requires a master carpenter. Before you hire a contractor for your complex crown molding have a look at his work. Check with his references and see if homeowners that have used him are happy with his work. You could even ask to see some of his older work to see if it has stood the test of time and temperature.

Tips on How to Cope and Where to Splice Crown Molding

A Cope is: a joint where one trim piece is undercut to the profile of the another piece. The joint ends up looking like a miter joint.

A Splice is: a joint of two trim pieces in a long straight run of trim. It is also called a field joint.

Plan out your crown molding. Draw a diagram for yourself. 1) Where possible avoid having any splices. When you must have a splice place it above an entry point rather that on a feature wall. This will make these field joints less obvious. 2) Try not to have a trim piece with two copes - it is all too easy to cut the piece too short. Because copes require a bit of fussing, undercut the cope end first and then mark the cut in place.

Baseboards

The quarter round should be nailed to the baseboard and not to the floor to allow the hardwood flooring to shrink and expand. Otherwise, quarter round that is nailed to the floor would pull away from the wall when the flooring fluctuates.

Chair Rails

Chair rails, as the name suggests, is trim that is installed as a rail or band around a room that prevents chairs from hitting and gouging the wall, at a height of roughly 32". Besides being a bumper around the dining room table they also add another decorative dimension to a room. A chair rail trim can be used to cause a dividing line between paint colors or between wallpaper and paint. One popular "country style" decor is to add a wall paper border above the rail, but each homeowner can incorporate trim into their own style of decorating.