Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Easy crown molding

What do you guys think of this?

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,20268018,00.html

I need to hide my QS8 wires and holing the walls isn't a good option, and my wife wants crown molding.

I'm not so good with accurate cuts (maybe someday I'll get better?) and I'm attracted by the easier nature of this type of product. Anyone have an experience with it?

How is it price-wise?

Heh. Just looked at comments on one of the pages of the article, and apparently Canamould is only sold in Canada and/or is extremely hard to get ahold of. Rats.

Any other recommendations? I've come across a couple, but they both seem kind of shady.

Ken, there are some types of pre-made corner treatments where the crown mold(square cut) simply butts up to it from each side. They look quite nice, much better than the silly pre-mitred corners from the B+M stores. Price can add up if you have a lot of them though...I've made a couple of my own to great effect in places where a mitred joint was not possible(Cathedral ceiling joining flat ceiling).

Crown mold corner blocks.

I'm just doing the living room, which is a regular ol' rectangle with a flat ceiling.

Ken.C - I used the corner blocks in my dinning room. They were so much easier than wrestling with those miter cuts. I stained the blocks and the molding to match the color of the other case molding in that room. Caveat: measure twice cut once. In my case, measure 10 X's, cut once.

Ken, I would totally use corner blocks and regular crown molding. With that foam and plaster stuff, because you're using joint compound to hide the seams, you'd need to do a bunch of touch-up painting after it's up. With corner blocks and wood -- depending on the flatness of walls and ceiling -- you might be able to get away with prepainting the molding, nailing it up, and then just filling and paining the nail holes. If, on the other hand, your walls or ceiling are a bit wavy, then you should use some paintable caulk to fill the gaps. I'm guessing you have some living room wall and ceiling paint left over?

By the way, if you want to borrow my chops saw (with laser cut line), let me know.

The key word is caulk. All pro installers use it to finish the crown molding gaps.

Yeah, I checked out some stuff on doing regular crown molding, and it all looks plenty straightforward, except for the inside corners and coping, which I do not have a great degree of confidence in. I'll talk to my wife and see how she feels about it (other than "why didn't you do this a long time ago so we didn't have ugly wires on the wall?")

By regular crown molding, you mean wood, right?

Just watched a TOH video on doing the coping cut. That doesn't look THAT hard, and if you'll loan me your chop saw, that makes life a lot easier (and less expensive!). I'd love to have my own miter saw, but it's not on my immediate list-o'-things-to-buy.

Ooh, just found another possible issue. The ol' metal studs rear their ugly heads again.. I probably don't have wood to nail into everywhere (anywhere?) in the room. Augh.

I'm starting to lean back towards the easy stuff again. More opinions?

+1 for the corner blocks. Have them throughout the house, but only the inside corners. IMHO, the outside blocks are HUUUUGGEEEE and really detract from the purpose of the crown.

for the rest of the cuts we used a DeWalt compound mitre saw which has detents in both planes for standard crown cuts. Just practice on some scrap to make sure you're cutting the right direction and angle.

You can glue (caulk or paneling adhesive) and nail a strip of 2X3, cut on the diagonal directly in the wall/ceiling corner. Let it dry, then nail your crown wherever you want anywhere along the length. Pre-caulk the edges and use a credit card to scrape the excess off after nailing the crown. You'll need two people for this to make it go quick enough to work with the caulk before it gets crusty.

So basically in the first link, they are saying "cut it and fill in the crack with mud". Gee, that doesn't help make a good joint.

Now, I did crown in my theater and I measured so many times, had the right tools including a device that measures inside angles, and I still had to fill the joint.

No matter what, crown is tough to put up right unless you have done a lot of it. So many variations in everything that the crown is up against.

I didn't cope anything, I did all cuts with the mitre saw. There are videos on how to do it on YouTube.

Oh, and if you do use caulk, make sure that it is paintable.

I know, the first stuff sounds really hinky. Basically, what I've found on (probably?) independent sites is that the people who have used it love it, while contractors think it is junk, but have never used it at all. So...

I think I'm going with it in any case. It's gotta be better than the wires I've got dangling all over the place.