DIY Crown Molding Day 4 and 5: Coping With Reality

Monday and Tuesday nights I finally made it to the actual installation of the crown molding. This was not before plenty of hand wringing over how I was actually going to cut the stuff. 7″ crown is too wide to be cut by a 10″ compound miter saw, or so I thought. I called friends and neighbors asking for ideas. One thought was to rent or buy a compound sliding miter saw. At $500 for the saw, I was going to rent for sure. Another friend said I could use a table saw. I was all set to do that until I realized there’s no way to make a cross cut with 12′ of molding hanging off one end. At last I called one more wood-working neighbor who suggested that I use my 10″ compound miter, but just complete the cuts with a hand saw. I had nothing to lose with this approach, as it cost me nothing to try it. It ended up working fine.

I also needed to figure out how to nail the molding. I could have used finishing nails pounded by hand, but that would have been a real pain. Especially since MDF molding needs pilot holes drilled before nailing through it. Instead I called up my in-laws from whom I’ve borrowed the magical pneumatic nailer before. I brought that home and loaded it up with 1.5″ nails and I was ready to go.

The first piece of molding went up without a hitch; because of course it had no angles or coping. It was great to finally see what the wall would look like finished off. Tricia and I had that momentary euphoria as if the project would take only 10 more minutes to complete. That wasn’t exactly what happened. I tried to cut my first inside corner angle at a 45 degree angle and 45 degree miter. I even coped the profile. When I put it in place it was the wrong angle. Ugh. So, I eyeballed the angle and went outside to make another cut, again coping the molding and again trying a dry fit. I had cut another wrong angle. I’m just not the sharpest tool in the shed, so it took me these 2 failures before it dawned on me to open the book that I bought and read the angle proper angle measurement. The third time was a charm. 2 hours into my installation I had the second piece installed.

My first coped corner, hooray!

What stopped me in my tracks on day 4 was the small angled wall. This wall had the only outside corners in the room. When I measure the angle of the corners they were 47 degrees. I looked up the angle in my trusty book only to find measurements that I could not do on my saw. So I tried doing half the angle. That wasn’t right. Then I sat down at the table with Tricia and did some Course III Trigonometry to try and figure out a logical angle. That wasn’t right. Finally, I went to bed defeated not knowing if I was going to ever get the proper angle, or if I would have to buy more crown so that I could continue to create useless angled triangle bits of wood.

One angle took me 2 hours to figure out

Tuesday evening I had a conversation with another friend, who in no uncertain terms, told me to eyeball the damn thing and stop calculating it. He was right. I kept nipping away at the angle until I had something close enough. The rest of the install was straight forward until I got to the very last piece. This is where I had one coped end to do, and the other was a joint that I had to get just right. This piece took me about 10 trips in and out of the house to the saw.

And with that, the cutting, coping and nailing was complete. It was just in time for me to reset the room for our small group meeting on Wednesday. The only thing left to do now is lots of tedious caulking and touch up painting. When that is done I’ll summarize the project in one final post.

DIY Crown Molding Project: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4,5 | Day 6