Michael Holigan: One of the subtle details that adds elegance to a room is a feature you probably give little thought to. It's called crown or trim molding. It's the decorative border which conceals the edge where the walls and ceilings meet. Trim molding can be as simple as a single strip of wood or an elaborate collection of different designs and materials. Let's start by looking at a few of the types of building materials you can use. The first one is paint grade. Now this wood is just pine. It's inexpensive. It's very easy to use. You can actually see the joint where the two pieces have been put together. That won't matter, though, after you paint it because it'll be a solid color over the surface. This is probably the most forgiving type of trim to work with. Next, comes our hardwoods. About three times more expensive. This is a very nice piece of oak, solid, and this is something that you would stain. The third material is plastic. Now plastic is not cheaper. It's about the same price as the hardwoods.

The reason people go with plastic is for those details, the same details you used to get years ago when there were craftsmen who would carve this out of wood. You're only limited by your imagination as you design your molding. Typically you want to choose materials of varied width and decoration. Smaller rooms look best with narrow three to four inch molding. Now when you get to a higher ceiling, let's say, 10, 12 feet high walls, you can go with something a little more substantial. This one is what's called four steps. It has four different materials to build this piece of crown molding - a 1x6 piece of plastic, rope trim and then a cap. Now a builder or a contractor is going to charge you per step, so the more steps you make, the more detailed it is, the more expensive it is. But it's not hard to put up yourself. Let me show you how.

First step is to measure all the walls. The first piece is 37" long. After you measure all the walls, add 10%, just to make sure you're going to have enough trim. At our work area we measure 37" along the flat piece of pine we are using as the base of our design. Other molding attached to this will hide corners, so the ends of the board require simple straight cuts. We anchor to the wall using screws that bore into the wood stud located behind the wall board. Install this layer all the way around the room. After you hang your boards you need to come back and re-measure for your other pieces. I need five and three-quarters. Now let's add some of the angled crown molding that will create a three-dimensional look. This is the most difficult step. You need to understand what we mean when we talk about an inside corner in a room and an outside corner where the walls jut out. Well, cutting the corners is where most people have a problem when putting up crown molding. It hangs at an angle and then we've got to cut it at an angle, so it confuses a lot of people. It's not that difficult. Let me show you a simple easy trick. First, flip the piece of crown molding upside down. Then you want to slide it into your saw, just like it would mount on the wall - the flat part against the back wall, the flat part on the bottom is against the base. Now this is the piece of wood we're going to cut. This is the inside of the wood. We want this and we're cutting an inside angle, so what do we do? We pull our saw toward us. We're going to cut an inside corner, so we pull the saw inside towards the piece we're going to keep. If we were going to cut an outside corner, you move the saw away from the piece that we want to keep. So outside corners move out away from the piece you want to keep. Inside corners move in to the piece you want to keep. The easiest way to install trim molding is with a nail gun. Where molding meets at the corners, apply some wood glue to keep the joints from popping apart. Now we can add a little decoration with thinner rope trim. Our fourth layer is a different width of pine that decorates the bottom edge. As a final step, caulk the slight spaces where the molding doesn't quite meet. You can conceal that later with paint. It really can be the crowning touch to any room in your new house, and you can have the satisfaction of doing it yourself while saving money at the same time.