Crown Molding and Trim Carpentry in Wilmington, DE

Crown frames a room from above. It hides the seam where the wall meets the ceiling, where plaster and drywall tend to crack as a house moves, and it gives a plain box of a room a finished edge. The profile and its size are matched to the room: a deep, stepped crown suits a tall dining room, while a lower ceiling takes a smaller profile so the room doesn't feel pressed down. The crown is also the finishing piece within the beams of a coffered ceiling, where it is cut around each square of the grid.

Chair rail is a single horizontal molding run around the room at about the height of a chair back. It began as a guard against chairs scuffing the plaster, and in dining rooms and halls, it now also serves as a line dividing the wall. Wainscoting covers the wall below that line with panels or boards, capped by the rail. Both have to run level around the room, even where the floor is not level, and both have to meet the door and window casings cleanly, either butting into them or returning to the wall at the ends.

Some trim jobs start with what is already there: a crown that stops at an archway and needs to continue into the next room, a run of original molding damaged by a leak, or a remodeled room that should look like the rest of the house. A molding is matched by its profile, height on the wall, and projection. The existing trim is compared with profiles that can still be bought, and where a stock profile won't pass for the original, the closest options are laid out along with the spot where new trim would meet old.

At an inside corner, two pieces of crown can be mitered, each cut at half the corner's angle so they meet in a seam. A miter only closes when the corner is exactly square, and trim moves a little with the seasons, so a mitered inside joint tends to open into a dark line. A coped joint avoids that. The first piece runs square into the corner. The second is cut on a miter to expose its profile, then back-cut along that profile with a coping saw, so its face fits over the first piece like a puzzle piece. If the wood moves, the joint slides instead of gapping. Outside corners can be mitered and glued. Where a wall runs longer than one length of molding, the two pieces can meet on a scarf joint: matching angled cuts, glued and nailed where there is framing behind.

Crown is nailed into the wall framing and, where it can be, into the ceiling joists. Where the joists run parallel to a wall, there may be no framing at the ceiling line for the top edge to catch, so the framing is located before the first piece goes up, and backing can be added where there is nothing to nail into.

A row-home stair hall is the hardest run of crown in the house. Where the ceiling follows the stairs up at a slope, the crown has to turn from a level run into a raking one at the bottom and back to level at the top. Each of those turns is a compound cut, angled two ways at once, and the raking piece has to meet the level one without its profile stepping out of line. In a narrow hall, that fitting happens over the stairs, so the cuts are planned around a safe place to stand.

The ceiling itself can wave, too. When a ceiling dips, the carpenter has to choose which line the eye will read: keep the crown straight and fill the gap above it, or let it follow the ceiling and hold its bottom edge as level on the wall as the room allows. In a long room the straight line tends to win, because the eye runs along it; in a small room with a deep sag, following the ceiling leaves less of a gap to hide.