So, the most exciting ever about finally getting the floor tiled and the walls up and painted is that you freaking FINALLY begin to see the Master Bathroom that you've been envisioning! And it's so exciting to share the fun stuff with y'all from here on out. Remember my To Do List? Here's what it looks like now:
Now that the floors have been done, the walls are beadboarded and painted, and the window/door/shower are in place - we can begin to put the finishing touches on the room. And a big one is the trim. 'Cause y'all, this room gonna be LOADED with trim.
Image Courtesy of: Cottage Living
See, over the years, I have helped my parents remodel and flip many, many homes and rentals. And one thing I can tell you about getting the most bang for your buck and making a room look really "done" is to take the time to add chunky, white trim to everything. Pony up for the wider (5"-6") stuff and paint it all a gorgeous semi-gloss white. Also, miter corners and add crown molding. It's a bitch - I'm not going to lie to you. But the finished product always makes a room look waaay more expensive and put-together than it actually might be (or cost). And if you can do the same trimwork/molding through the entire house? You're friggin' gold.
So that's what we decided to do. We took the time to pick out the perfect style of trim for around the windows and doors (a simple cottage-style with straight lines), the best floorboard (we needed one that would fit under our kitchen cabinets [about three room remodels from now]), and (luckily) we already had bunches of the ideal crown molding. See, when The Boy moved in he immediately removed all the carpet in the house and replaced it with laminate flooring. A friend gave him some crown molding and he promptly used it as floorboards. So, my first job was to measure and remove crown molding/baseboards from around the house to use in the Master Bathroom.
And that was the easy part. Let me just put it this way. You know how expensive it is to hire someone to install crown molding in your house? Yeah, that's because it's a total BITCH to put in. Seriously. I let The Boy buy a miter saw and we watched some shows on HGTV that gave us tips... how hard can it be?
Um. Hard. Very, very hard. Because you know what? It involves a BUNCH of math. Like, we had assumed (wrongly) that the angles to cut to miter the corners would be 45 degree. Right? WRONG! It's actually 35.3 degrees on one and 31.6 degrees on the other. And don't even get me started on the whole "cut this one upside down" then "this one right side up and backwards." Anyhoodles, it basically took us an entire day of trying before I broke down and found this helpful little site on Google (since then, I've also found this helpful tutorial with lots of photos).
But! We finally managed it. One weird thing that we did have to end up doing was cutting the lengths of crown molding into smaller pieces, miter the corners, nail those pieces into place, and the cut and insert a piece of crown molding into the center of the two end pieces. This was because our house was so poorly built that it is horribly unlevel (which just could not be fixed). So it looked a little something like this:
Sometimes, done is beautiful. This was one of those instances. Now, it was my turn. I'm the Official Project Finisher-er. I grabbed my tub of colored-then-turns-white spackle and used my finger (it's easier to use your fingers in detailed molding than using a putty knife) to smoosh it into all the cracks and crevices.
After it had dried (and I had done multiple layers in the areas that needed to be built up), I sanded the crap out of everything. Next, I prepped the crown molding for paint by cleaning the areas with a damp microfiber rag and taping off everything.
I should also point out that during the crown molding process, we also used a piece of flat wood trim to cover the seam of the paneling (faux batten board) on the ceiling. It fit right in place with a bit of adhesive and some finishing nails:
I used Olympic Low VOC paint (color-matched) in Martha Stewart's Popcorn in a semi-gloss finish for all the trim in the whole room. It was such a nice, clean white (with a bit of grey undertone to give it depth). All-in-all, I really liked how it turned out:
Next up was tackling the trim for around the window, door, and shower walls. I just wanted something really simple and clean-looking so we ended up picking up a bunch of flat 1x4's at Home Depot. I primed (with grey-tinted Olympic Low VOC primer that I found in the seconds at Lowe's) them and gave 'em one coat of trim paint (the same color and finish as the crown molding) before we cut them and put them up.
P.S. That's what happens when you paint trim in the kitchen and then leave it there for a few days and still cook in the kitchen. Yeah. Ew. By the way... that's tomato sauce - I make a killer lasagna.
So, back to the trim - pretty much all I wanted was vertical boards topped with a horizonal board (with a 1 1/2" overhang).
After the trim was up, it was a rinse and repeat of the crown molding. Spackle, sand, clean, paint. And paint. And paint (I did about three coats total on all the trim). Next up was the window. The Boy trimmed the inside first (just the same 1x4's as the trim) and then did the outside. Last was the sill which we just traced out on a piece of 1x6 and then tinkered with until it fit the way I liked. And spackle, sand, clean, paint.
Nice right? I'm especially happy with how the window turned out (Caira enjoys sitting on it and "helping" me do my hair). Last came the floorboards. These were easier than the crown molding but did require a few minor tweeks to get around the toilet and shower. Here's a good tutorial (with pictures) on how to miter and cope floorboards.
To finish off the floorboards, we added some paintable, composite (perfect for a bathroom) quarter-round around the bottom of all the floorboards and the shower base. Aaand once again, spackle/sand/clean/paint. To finish off the whole room, I also used caulk around all the trim pieces - to prevent moisture from rotting everything out. The Boy tried to help with this part of the process but was quickly banned since he would get bored and then start smearing blobs of caulk randomly around the room (trying to fill in gaps). I nearly killed him because you cannot sand caulk like you can spackle so I was having to go back and carefully trim out the bumpy parts with a razor blade. Kill.
But not bad, right? The very last thing that did was tackle the corners of the walls - where the beadboard didn't quite met up (beadboard paneling is a beyotch to miter). This was so simple that I took care of it one day while The Boy was at work. I just used a utility knife to remove some old trim from our bedroom (it has floor-to-ceiling paneling like the bathroom was) and painted it.
And this is what it's covering up:
Super simple to install. All I did was trim each piece to fit and nail it into place. Then, I spackled, sanded, cleaned, and painted it to match the walls. Bingo. Done. And that's the trim. It took a bit of time to get everything into place and we definitely got very frustrated in the process but I'm really glad that we did it. Because it looks damn good - and since we're doing the exact same trim through the entire house - it was important to make this work.
Have any of you installed trim before? What kind (did you tackle crown molding on your own?)? Did it make you wan to kick kittens? Is there a parttutorial or online resource that you used to help guide you through the process? Share away - I'm trying to load up on trim knowledge for our future remodeling projects!
