Details Matter

When you suffer from renovationism one of the more positive side effects is attention to detail. This probably also stems from my education in graphic design and early career as an art director. I do obsess over the details in our renovation projects. This is one of the reasons I do my own caulking and painting. I'm pretty picky. One of the early details we needed to determine since we knew we would renovate this entire house was the trim molding. The house had none. We decided we wanted the home to look like it was older than it was by using older molding styles. And we wanted a consistent molding throughout our home so it would look like it was all built that way in the first place. We got as much of that work done before we moved in as possible and then just kept moving things (mostly boxes) around while we continued to work. Here is a series of photos of the work in progress:

We selected a wide, but simple, door casing. There was no door casing at all here originally, just drywall wrapped around the doorway opening.

We also selected really tall base molding and put garage stop instead of quarter round. This height matched the height of the baseboard heating units and really helped those to blend in more.

The crown molding we selected was also bigger than typical and had a very simple cove shape. You can see here that crown was put in before the door casings were added.

Another feature we really liked from our old house was the coffered ceiling in the living room. I saw no reason not to repeat a design choice we made before and liked. Here it is going in. You can see the structure of this. You have to select how many squares you want in the room and which direction the full-length beams will go. The beams in the other direction go in between those full-length beams. We designed this ceiling with nine squares so we got good sized squares and had one in the middle of the ceiling, which would allow for a center fixture.

The nine square design also worked well in conjunction with the bay window.

Once the beams are done, the molding along the walls goes in to match the height of the beams.

The final step is to put small crown molding inside each square. The type I selected did not come in primed wood. Bummer. I had to prime all these myself.

The molding work was really starting to come together and the room is beginning to take shape.

This is the other side of the doorway into the living room.

And, the doorway to the dining room was also just drywall, so now it matches the doorway to the living room.

All this work going on an once was difficult to live with. But, you can see all that pink paint. I had to get all the trim work done before I could start painting walls. That was the motivation that kept me caulking and painting every night until midnight for months.

Trim work isn't the only detail that matters. Next I'll show some of the early lighting decisions we made to ensure we weren't tearing up any finished trim or wall work.