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Mangrove Bay Design

Interior Design and Residential Building Design Projects and Trends

Great Moldings: A Lesson

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Ok, found this little ditty while hunting for more information after arguing with a tradesman about what to call what when talking about where what pieces go around a door, sheesh, it would be great if didn’t turn into a pissing contest sometimes…

And really lets just get the right stuff in the right place, that’s what I really care about, Shakespeare said a rose is still a rose by any other name. Enjoy….

 

Back in the mid-1980s, my brother and I were growing tired of installing 1 1/2 in. clamshell casing, and 2 1/2 in. streamline baseboard. As finish contractors, after we’d installed the doors and windows, that’s all we did on every job, day after day. By then we’d nailed off miles of small trim in thousands of apartments and hundreds of single-family homes. The market was starting to soften up about that time, and one of the contractors we worked for needed an edge against other spec builders in the same subdivision. We suggested upgrading the moldings in one of his homes. Not the whole house, mind you, only the first floor. We told him we’d do it for our cost, just to prove a point.

We installed 3 1/4 in. casing on all the first-floor doors—the entry, dining and living room passageways, the kitchen, and powder bath doorways. And we installed 5 1/4 in. baseboard everywhere downstairs. That house stood apart from all the others and it sold quickly.

On the next job, we installed some crown molding, just in the entry way. By then, realizing that moldings meant quality to his buyers, the contractor was on board. Before long we were installing crown in the living room and dining room, in the kitchen, hallway, and even the powder bath. These days, we install crown molding in almost every room of every house we work in, along with coffered ceilings in the dining and living rooms, wainscoting paneling from the entry through to the kitchen, elliptical crown in ceiling soffits, paneled archways, etc. I always wondered why we weren’t doing that type of work all along.

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