Home Improvement Articles and Remodeling Ideas

Home Decorating with Molding

Discover great tips and ideas to enhance your home with crown molding, cornice molding, cove molding and more.

By Christina on October 24, 2005
Category: Wall Moulding

A great way to enhance any room in your home is to add molding to your walls. If you mount an elaborate crown molding along the top of your walls, the once ordinary walls turn instantly into conversation pieces. Put up an intricate chair rail to give your living-room wall architectural design. Or fashion the sharp, clean lines of exquisite panel molding on walls to give your room a dramatic frame.

Whatever types of molding you desire, they are sure to transform your space for the better. Molding gives charm, elegance and character to your room. Charm, elegance and character give happiness to homeowners.

Where Moldings are Used

Moldings are frequently placed at points where walls touch ceilings, and/or touch floors. Applying moldings to places where walls and ceilings and floors all meet, soften the angles of their jointure. Thus, molding creates the appearance that a seamless flow exists between the ceiling and the wall, or the wall and the floor.

Moldings add decorative flair to your walls. Decorative moldings can make a traditional house look like an up-to-date contemporary home, or make a modern home seem more traditional in appearance. And you can use molding essentially anywhere in your home.

There aren’t particularly any rules in place stating that you can’t explore the use of molding. However, many homeowners choose to place moldings around the perimeter of living rooms and dining rooms, in entryways, and in bathrooms. You can even turn your simple ceiling fan or chandelier into opulent pieces simply by surrounding them with molding.

Try using decorative molding around windows to conceal the gap between the window frame and the wall. Molding is also used to fill in the gaps between walls and doors. Molding can be used on doors too. Imagine turning a plain, flat door into a Grecian paneled beauty that swings you inside your home every evening. Other great places to add molding includes around your fireplace, and as framing around a bookcase.

Types of Molding

The first step of planning where to place molding is to decide what molding will add the most to your walls. Do you want your walls to be lavishly ornate or beautifully basic? There are many styles of molding, and each style has its advantages. One should consider the overall room design before selecting his or her type of molding.

Cornice molding is positioned at the top of a room’s wall where the ceiling and wall join together. Adding cornice molding to the top of a wall will, without doubt, add drama to your room. In fact, there are two types of cornice molding to choose from: crown molding and cove molding.

Usually, pieces of crown molding are mixed and matched with other molding styles to create extravagant wall décor. A single, intricately detailed molding on a wall is frequently two simple decorative crown-molding pieces that have been fashioned together to create one grand look. This means that the look of your room can be taken instantly from basic family room to an opulent den.

Cove molding has concave outline; the sides are curved-in. The molding appears to provide a “cove” shape when applied to a wall’s surface. Cove molding is used at the junction of an interior wall and ceiling. It is often used as tool to eliminate the line both the ceiling and the wall make when they join together. Cove molding is versatile, and can be cut and shaped into almost any finely crafted design.

Another great molding style that can augment the appearance of your walls is Frieze molding. Frieze moldings are wide, horizontal bands that frame doors, windows and the upper part of a wall in a room. It can be almost any material, for example, molded, metal, poplar, etc. And it can be almost any design, such as embossed beading, embossed floral, traditional molding, etc. Frieze molding can be elaborately detailed or a plain, simple band.

Chair Rail molding divides the wall horizontally and lines the perimeter of the room. It was once used to protect the wall’s surface from chair damage. The tops of chairs caused scuffs, marks, blemishes, and for this reason, most chair rail is traditionally placed on the wall about 32 inches up from the floor. Today, most chair rail is simply used for decoration. It is probably the most popular type of molding found in the home. Chair rail molding enhances the room by giving your walls adornment, and provides continuity to a room by unifying it.

Picture-frame molding is just as it sounds. When applied to walls, picture-frame molding looks as though an empty frame is mounted on your wall. This style of molding is very delicate in design, and is reminiscent of the design-style found in old colonial and Georgian homes. Experts suggest that picture-framing molding should be applied above chair rail and roughly 10 to 12 inches down from the top of the ceiling on an average-height wall. Typically, picture-frame molding comes in 1-inch widths up to 3-inch widths.

Molding Finishes

You’re practically limitless in your choices of molding finishes. Any sort of good-quality latex or oil base paint finishes any type of molding. You could finish your molding by adding gold, silver or copper leaf finishes. You could even faux finish a piece of molding. Just imagine painting a plain white chair rail so that it looks like a piece of grained wood! New decorative finishes are popping up all the time, so do your research before you make your final decision of a particular molding finish.

Picture-frame Fallacy

In response to your article, picture frame molding does not have to be placed above chair-rail molding. although this is an option for creative effect. More often than not, it is actually placed below chair rail molding, and spaced no closer than 2-3/4" margins between each frame and the chair rail molding itself.
January 06, 2008 | Reply |

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