Easy Picture Moulding Tutorial

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If you have been following along for a bit, you know I am a sucker for a relatively easy DIY that packs a punch. I have been on kind of a roll putting picture moulding throughout my house, and to tell you the truth, I don't know if there is a spot that is safe from it. So far I have put it in three different rooms, and on three different doors. I can't get enough of this stuff and I have to chalk it up to the difficulty level, which is slim to none.

For this entry, I am going to talk specifically about our bedroom picture moulding, which ended up having magical powers (more about that later). You may remember a few posts back where I walked you readers through my process of adding moulding boxes to our theater room. Those boxes were about as easy as it gets, but I took it a little bit further with our bedroom, and the way that it changed the room is really amazing to me. If you're looking for the details on what tools I used, I encourage you to check that post out first. Since we live in an old farmhouse, we also live with low ceilings, and ours come in at 8 ft. They always seem a bit low to me, especially since we had such tall ceilings at our old house, but the ceiling in our bedroom seems particularly low because part of it is angled (due to the pitched roof). Since raising our ceilings isn't an option for us, I am always looking for ways to trick the brain into thinking that the ceilings appear taller than they are. The way to do this is by finding a way to bring the eyes UP. You can do so with curtains or wall art or a feature wall, and the picture moulding that I chose did just that for us.

I decided on a bit more complex design for this room, and I had good reason to do so. I chose two rows of picture boxes because two separate sections would make the ceiling appear even higher than if I had just done a few tall, individual boxes. I wanted to keep things simple (do you sense a trend?) so I decided that the perfect spacer for between my boxes would be my level since I had it on had for the project anyways. I started by deciding how high I wanted my lower row of boxes to go, which in my case was dependent on the height of my headboard. I wanted to make sure that the bottom boxes were larger than the top ones, and that the top of the bottom boxes was taller than the headboard. Say that five times fast. As for the width, I based those on the width of our nightstands. I wanted them a bit wider than the nightstands and so I cut a length that I liked. There may be different factors in your own room and how you determine the size, but this is what worked for our room, and this is how I do most of my projects. I determine spacing by what I think looks good. Surely not the method for everyone, but it's how my brain works, so let's just embrace it.

It should be noted that when cutting, the length that you want will be the long side of your trim piece. What I mean by that is this: when cutting, AS LONG AS there are no angles in your ceiling (i.e. your boxes are either rectangles or squares), then all of your cuts will be 45 degree cuts. I used my miter shears to cut one side, and then make sure that I cut the second angle so that wide part of the angle was at the same spot as the desired length of the trim piece. I continued on like this, determining lengths and cutting until I had my all my pieces ready to go. I followed that up with nailing in place (don't forget to check that level). Again, I used the level itself to determine the spacing between the boxes themselves so that they would all be spaced evenly... seems easy enough, right? That IS right, but remember how I mentioned that our bedroom ceilings were slanted?

Finding the angles for those pieces kind of freaked me out, to be totally honest with you. When trying to figure stuff like this out, my mind doesn't immediately go to math, and though I am sure there is a very precise mathematical way to determine these angles, I went with my gut and found a way to draw them out. I started by using my level to determine spacing and drew a line where the bottom of the trim piece would sit. I then extended this line past the actual perimeter of the picture box (or triangle in this case). I used two smaller trim pieces for the next step and followed the following sequence:

1. Line the first one up with along the ceiling.

2. Line the second one along the line that I drew for my moulding perimeter.

3. Let them overlap on top of each other.

4. Scribe along the top of the horizontal trim piece on to the piece that was running along the ceiling.

5.This gave me the angle that I needed, so I simply cut along the line.

Once the tricky angles were determined and cut, all that was left was to fill my nail holes and seams, caulk along the edges, and paint! I love the look of monochrome accent walls and so I chose to paint the moulding the same color as the rest of my walls, which is Sherwin Williams Alabaster (a lovely warm white if you are in the market). It is absolutely amazing to me that this simple DIY truly magically transformed our space. There is no doubt that the ceilings appear taller in this room now- just take a peep at that before and after below! Not only that, but the boxes bring depth to the space, therefore elevating the design of the room. Well, what are you waiting for?! Go raise some ceilings!

BEFORE...

... AFTER!!

And OH MY GOSH, the sconces! How could I forget the sconces?! I ordered these sconces, (I swapped out the stock shades for some I already had) and though I am known to use a puck light for unwired sconces, I upgraded to back up battery light bulbs for these and they worked great!

.... until next time! xo