LESLIE: WGUF in Florida is where Douglas listens to The Money Pit. And you’ve got a crown moulding question. Well, how can we help?
DOUGLAS: Well, I had a question. I have an older home and a very low ceiling; an eight-foot ceiling. And I wanted to do something to dress the place up a little bit.
TOM: OK.
DOUGLAS: And I went to my local home improvement center and I saw 20 different kinds of crown moulding but they were all four inch wide and just looked like – I thought maybe that was too much to put up. And I wondered if there were different widths and then if you – also, I had heard about some prefab plastic crown mouldings and I wondered …
LESLIE: Well, the home center’s sometimes only have a limited supply of profiles of the crown mouldings. And yes, they do come in a variety of different sizes. They come even way bigger than that. A great resource is Dyke’s Lumber – D-y-k-e – and they pretty much sell just about every type of profile of moulding available in oak and poplar and composites. I mean really you name it, they’ve got it. So if there’s something specialized that you’re looking for, that would be a good place to start.
Crown moulding does so many wonderful things for a space. It gives it a design and an architectural aspect to really focus your eye upon. It covers any seams that you might see from the house shifting from where the ceiling meets the wall. It does a great job at covering up that flaw. But you can also do something creative and put the crown moulding actually on your ceiling and it sort of creates a vaulted look to it as well; which is a good idea – especially if you want to go with something a little bit more creative.
So, I say keep an open mind and if it’s something you like, go for it.
TOM: Leslie, Doug said he had an eight-foot ceiling. If he was to use sort of a different color crown moulding than his ceiling and walls, then that may tend to box it in. But if he had the walls be darker and then the ceiling and the crown moulding were both, say, a light color …
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Be the same.
TOM: … it would sort of like really raise that ceiling, wouldn’t it?
LESLIE: Oh, yeah. And I am all for – I’ve seen a lot of people, on my makeover shows that I work on, paint the ceiling a color because they think …
TOM: Right.
LESLIE: … it’s interesting. But just did a classroom, on Trading Spaces, where the ceiling was painted a peach and the walls were painted orange. And all that did was make that room seem so small. So if you keep the ceiling a light color, you really give the illusion of height to a space.
DOUGLAS: Is there any reason I should match the baseboard coloring with the crown moulding or just go on my own?
LESLIE: I usually do base and crown the same color as well as any trim and door work in the room.
TOM: Just don’t go dark, OK, Doug?
DOUGLAS: So to keep the place salable, go white, huh?
TOM: Absolutely.
LESLIE: Or a form of.
DOUGLAS: (overlapping voices) Alrighty.
TOM: Or, you know, or an off-white or one of the many zillion forms of off-white. (laughing)
Doug, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT and for listening to us down in Florida on WGUF.
Leave a Reply