Choosing the Crown

I love the charm of old homes, but we had decided to go with something younger early in our house hunt. Not that there aren't issues in our late 80's home, but the increased insurance costs paired with the requirements of owning a home with a historical designation (LOTS of rules and regulations for how you fix and upgrade things) made us feel like it just wasn't a good idea for our first house. As a compromise, Josh told me that I could add charming details to whatever house we bought.

So begins my first crown molding project - the dining room. As previously mentioned, we're going for an elegant, formal feel and the moldings really need to reflect that without going too over the top. Something like this would be very out of place in our 1986 center hall colonial with eight foot ceilings:

myfinishcarpetry.com is the former site of The Joy of Moldings

In all of my internet research, the best blog that I've found is The Joy of Moldings. They break their projects down well and show the exact combinations of pieces that are used. Ken is completely opposed to one-piece moldings and reading his posts convinced me that we needed a three-piece molding. What do I mean by one-piece and three-piece? Here is the one-piece next to the three-piece sample I made for the dining room:

And the profile of the three-piece. You can see that there is a flat piece at the bottom and an ogee baseboard at the top. The one-piece is only the middle molding.

Josh named the three-piece crown "monster molding" and thought it would be a bit too much for the space. Of course by expressing that sentiment he was volunteering to spend 30 minutes on a ladder in the dining room holding them up so that I could ponder the decision.

 

 I'm pretty sure he's holding it upside down, here. 

I hate when this happens, but I think he's right.  The three-piece would be overpowering to the rest of the room and our ceiling height just doesn't work with it. I may eventually add a picture rail below it to take it up a notch, but again, that will depend on the door casing which will depend on the wainscoting which will depend on the flooring, so it's a tbd for now.