The Dale C. Maley Family Web Site

Adding Crown Molding to Existing Bathroom

My wife wanted me to add crown molding to our existing kid's bathroom.  Fortunately, I had a book, Decorating with Artchitectural Trimwork, that showed how to position the crown molding for basic miter saw cuts (you must turn molding upside down and place molding at angle in saw).

I also made a wood box to simulate the walls and ceiling so I could check the quality of my coping cut:

Here is a photo of installing crown molding:

  Here are photos of finished project:

Lessons Learned on This Project:

I had not cut crown molding for at least 30 years....except for 10 years ago when I made a shelf for the basement. The molding we picked at Lowes was the biggest they had, but I could still set it at the normal angle in my miter saw.  This meant I could use normal miter saw, and not have to lay the molding flat and mess with compound miter angles.

I decided to use cove approach, where you remove material by hand from the joint..but is allows for expansion and contraction without opening up the joint. I first cut away a lot of the material with a hand coping saw, then finished with my Dremel using a 1/2" dia sanding drum.

I also built a fixture box so I could check the quality of the cove joint as I made it.  See picture above for the fixture box.  It really helped me do the joints.  I don't have a fancy air or electric nailer, so I used 3.5" long finishing nails and nailed them by hand. I did buy a new stud finder at Lowes..which worked very well on this project.

Two issues I ran into. The first was that one piece of molding had to have the top planed by hand because the ceiling slightly sagged! The 2nd was that my last piece was 1/2" short....it turns out because I slightly twisted a 12 ft long run piece when I installed it. Fortunately, I had bought an extra piece of cove molding, so I had enough to make a new and longer piece. I ended up measuring the top and bottom length, then changed the miter box angle to match the new angle.  On future projects, always mark the dimensions so you can crudely check the board is not twisted and is installed at correct angle....especially long runs like 12 ft!

You can see larger photos of this project here.