Assembling Crown Molding

Many new homes have “great rooms” that make typical molding and millwork look puny. There are larger variations of common sizes available at the big box home improvement stores (5 1/2″ baseboard to replace 3 1/2″ for example), but sometimes even the largest stock sizes are dwarfed by a room that is kitchen, dining room and living room combined.

I figured out that the way to make large crown molding is to combine several pieces of molding intended for other, smaller applications.

I bought several pieces of different styles of MDF molding from Home Despot in three foot lengths, and used a chop saw to cut off three inch samples. The samples will stand up on a table, so I can arrange them and get an idea of what they will look like assembled. In the example I am showing here, there are two pieces of baseboard molding on the “wall” and “ceiling” planes, and there are two pieces of crown molding – one for the actual ceiling crown, and the other as a blind for rope lighting.

Once I’ve mixed and matched and arranged a pattern I like with the small cutoffs, I take the remaining pieces (two feet, nine inches) and tack them together so they can be held up against the ceiling in the location I intend to cover, which enables me to get a good judgment of the scale.  In this case, it’s simply too big – not only in overall scale, but the descender will interfere with the doorway. So I removed one of the two baseboard pieces from both top and bottom, and ran the spot check again. Ah! Much better!

Later this year, I will be trimming this room, and the research part of the project is now done.

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