How To Cut & Install Crown Moulding

hi i'm shannon from houseimprovements.com and today i just want to show you how to install decorative crown molding uh in your home so we've got about a i don't know even sure it must be a five or six inch crown mold and some of it's already been installed actually the homeowner was diligent in uh starting the project and we're gonna actually just finish the last few pieces off and uh and show you how to do it so they've gone around the house installed the crown mold did all the the main rooms and everything and we're going to finish the entry you can see that it's been brad nailed into place with some 18 gauge brad nails probably 2 inch that's what i would recommend and it the crown mold we're using is a mdf product that's well it would have come primed uh the homeowner's already painted it and uh once it's up then it's just a matter of filling all your nail holes touching up any uh joints and that sort of thing and then touching up the paint as well okay so one of the first things that you want to do is you're going to have to obviously go around and measure all your different wall lengths or you know a couple at a time however you want to work it out and usually what i do just like in one of my other videos on cutting baseboards was i make a bit of a map of room on a piece of paper copy my measurements onto there and then i can kind of have that as a reference i know if i'm doing inside outside whatever type of corners i'm going to do for the most part on a painted molding like this i would just use miter cuts so the outside corners will be mitered the inside corners will be mitered as well you can do a coping cut and we will demonstrate one of them on an inside corner obviously once i explain once i show you how to do it you'll understand that it can only be done on an inside corner i normally wouldn't do it on a paint grade type trim because you can easily fill a paint grade trim and touch up the paint but if you're working with something that's stained it's a little nicer joint and then you don't have to try to go back and touch it up usually so like i said one of the first things i want to do is go around get my measurements on the lengths of the wall so this here this piece here will end up being two outside corners and you can see over on this corner the the piece there has already been installed protruding around the corner make all your measurements on the wall though don't try to measure up here where you're guessing where your trim is going to be so uh in this case i'm going to butt right into the back of that trim that's already on there measure over to this corner and i've got 32 and 3 8 and i'm just going to mark it on here and after i've got a few measured what i do is just transfer that onto my road map or my piece of paper okay so that'll be outside corners and we've got 32 and 3 8. so i'm just going to move over around the corner here so i can reach the next one so on this one here we've got an inside corner over here and an outside corner here so i just simply butt my tape measure right into the inside corner into that other wall and measure right over and take a reading on the on the very outside corner of the drywall corner bead here which is 59 and an eighth right on the nose i'll just make a note of that okay i've actually already uh pre-measured some of the other pieces and and pre-cut them as well so uh i think the next thing to do oh i guess i should talk about this this is something else that we kind of did ahead of time your corners will not always be you can't take it for granted that they're going to be 90 degrees as long as they're within a 1 degree plus or minus of 90 90. generally your your angles are going to work out pretty nicely but if you have a protractor or some type of tool for checking angles just simply this one comes with the jig that i'm going to use by the way just put it on there so that both arms are against the wall and then you can take a reading right off the the angle guide that's on there and you can record that on your paper as well if there's any that are a little off or you know maybe you've got some 45 degree angles and that sort of thing we're dealing completely with 90 degree angles here or they're all very close within a degree anyways so all of our cuts are going to be 45 degrees if you're coming into a section of wall where the walls are at 45 degrees to each other your angles are going to be 22 and a half so you're always dividing whatever the angle is by two and cutting that angle on the ends of your two pieces so if you have a protractor it'll definitely help it works the same way obviously in the inside corner i'm just going to butt it in there tighten up the little wing nut and then make the reading there this one's about 90 and a half degrees so so we're pretty good one thing that kind of throws uh your your angles off is the fact that especially if it's a drywalled wall which in most cases it will be because you'll have a bit of a build up of mud for the first four to six inches usually in the corners even on the outside corners so your corners can always be a little bit wonky it seems like because they're not really always completely true so don't get too bent out of shape if if you know you think you've measured it all right cut it right and they don't quite match up the way you thought they were going to it's usually because of the fact of the buildup of drywall mud in the corner so but anyways i think we'll switch to the shop now and show you how to cut these with the jig that i have and we'll maybe uh even cut one without the jig just so you have an idea how to do it without it okay so we're out in the shop here now and we're using a 12 inch miter saw depending on your trim you may not need that big of a saw but that is just what we're using today and we've got our trim i just uh our particular stuff comes in 14 foot length so i just cut it in a piece that's easier to deal with here showing you our trim when it goes up on the wall is going to be like this with the profile in this direction now the one tricky thing about cutting crown mold is you are going to be cutting it actually flipped upside down and that's where most people usually get mixed up because you're flipping it moving it and you're trying to keep your mind wrapped around what you're doing and it can get confusing but so that's the trim we're using we're going to use i'm mostly going to show you using this jig that i've got it's made by craig you can purchase it online just search craig crown pro molding jig and you'll be able to find it on there it works pretty good like i think i mentioned before these crown molds come in different angles actually i might not have mentioned it there's different angles that they will sit on the wall uh 45 52 and 38 i think are the main three main ones and that just has to do with how it sits in the corner so this jig here is uh basically adjustable on the bottom to set to whatever angle your crown is supposed to sit against the wall and all that does is angle this this base here and the important part of that is most baseboards and casings and that sort of thing you can lie either on the bed of the saw or the fence of the saw and get your cuts right where with this molding it needs to sit you know on an angle it can't lay flat i guess you can with a compound miter saw but it's easier to use this jig i find now some people will just you know find where the happy medium is and lean it against the fence and that can work but there's more chance of it slipping or moving on you when you're doing that so that's why i like the jig so to start with we'll we'll make our first cut we're going to make the inside corner cut so again just to keep it in your mind it's not a bad idea a lot of times i'll stand at the saw and i'm just visualizing how that piece is going to go so if i'm standing i'm cutting the longer piece over top the closet doors if you remember back to me measuring it so this piece installed is going to sit up there like this so i'm just visualizing my head okay i need this bottom corner to be the long point and the angle is going to come back it's going to come back this way okay and that's my first cut now remember we've got to turn it upside down now and this is where most people the confusion comes in even for those of us who do it now and again okay so i'm going to take my jig i've turned my crown upside down oops i need to get my stand a little closer it sits nicely on the on the jig face and the jig sits right back against the uh the fence and for this cut like i said we want this this is our bottom remember because we flipped it upside down we want this to be our long point the angle is coming back this way uh we are going to cut a 45 degree angle so i change the saw to 45 degrees and i just extend my uh molding out far enough that i can cut it with the blade and i'm keeping my jig back so i don't cut it and then i just get everything held tight against the fence start the saw and make the cut okay so now again just to reconfirm what you did i usually pull it out of the saw hold it up again reconfirm yeah okay i've got my angle i made the first cut correctly i haven't screwed up yet so uh there's our inside corner now we need an outside corner on this end i'm going to flip this upside down i'm going to make the measurement from my little road map that i drew on this scrap piece and this one is 59 1 8 and that was measured against the wall right from the corner so i'm hooking right on my long point down there which was the corner 59 and 1 8 is what i want to mark here right there i don't know if the camera can even see that but you get the idea so i've measured this this face right here is what's against the wall when this is turned upside down so there's my mark where i want to cut and i'm hooked right on the sharp end down there and that's part of the reason why i cut that inside corner first because it's easier for me to hook my tape onto this end and measure from it then from an inside corner where i can't hook my tape so so whenever i can i try to cut my inside corner first if there's an inside and outside what am i getting rid of the jig for okay so put my jig back on here again let's just reconfirm what we're doing i'm holding it up this is the position it's going to be here's my mark way over here and i want this basically to get cut on an angle like that so my mark is a short point and up here is a long point turn it upside down and just make sure my jig isn't going to get in the way of the blade i'm holding it down tight to my jig and back to my fence i'll just just eyeball the blade up here so i can get close this saw also does have a laser guide but uh i don't i don't always 100 trust it when you're trying to make a real fine cut so i'll just start it up to see where the laser is so the laser says i'm a bit long so i'd rather be long on my first cut than short so we're going to make an initial cut and see where we're at okay bring my piece out just confirm that i've at least got my angles going the right direction i've got an inside cut here an outside corner cut here so uh hopefully that's correct so the next step would be to take it in and just dry fit it on the wall make sure that everything looks like it's going to work out with what we've already got there so i've got a couple more pieces to cut and then we'll go in and just test fit these okay so we're back inside and we're at the piece that you just watched me cut on the saw something else that will help you out a little bit is if you make up a couple sample pieces in our case we just cut for 90 degree corners but so this one's got the the right and the left inside i've got another one for right and left outside corner it just helps you to reconfirm that you've got things uh going in the right direction if you can slide it into the pieces that you've got get the crown positioned in the corner nicely so just kind of use it as a guide to help you out getting things placed so uh this is the piece that you were watching me cut it in for end again so we got it going the right way i'm going to put a bit of glue on the end i've already uh dry fit it and then we reconfirmed with that little piece that you just see me use so i will get positioned up here so now i just want to put it against the wall slide it into the piece we've already got on the wall until i'm happy with the uh i'm just going to kick this slide it in until i'm happy with the way the the joint kind of works out there and i'm gonna nail it into place okay and i'll get another couple i'm nailing about every 16 inches just get another couple in there so it'll stay up there now you can see you can probably see on the camera we've got a little bit of a space here again part of that is you know you get your build up a mud here you're trying to twist the trim to make it fit uh with the paintable or with yeah with the paintable trim we can simply go back and fill that with either a paintable caulking or a patch and uh smooth it out and paint it once it's dry and it'll look fine so i'm just going to get rearranged here a little bit so i can come out to the outside corners and do this other piece this is definitely a job where two people makes it a lot easier so if you can get somebody to give you a hand it'll make your life simpler so i've got my sample piece here for an outside corner so again i can just confirm that everything is uh gonna work out pretty good here looks like it's all right this other piece was already installed it's gonna be pretty good too so i've got the piece for this wall which has two outside corners on it so i can bring it up now and just get an idea whether everything's going to work out we're going to be pretty nice there once everything gets tight so this piece here that you know we just nailed the other end we just want to maneuver it around until we're happy with kind of the way the angle and everything closes up it's going to be pretty good there i can talk it into place and i should have my safety glasses on and your ceilings could be up and down a little bit so you're going to get some spacing there and again you may have to caulk it or whatever you want to do to match that up a little nicer see how everything is here this should work out pretty good so i'm going to glue this end so i got the glue on the two ends there you're definitely better off if you can glue your joints up it just helps them hold together a little better i'm just going to get my bottom in where i want it i'll come back and work at the top edge a little bit once i get this fastened okay so i can try to force that up there and over it's a little more open than i would like you can see the movement in there just with the i don't know if you can even see that bit of space here just the way with the ceiling i can't quite get the two to come right together there besides a little better and i'm sure we'll get lots of comments on this uh here but depending on your walls and your ceiling and everything makes a difference on what you can and can't have now that just doesn't want to stay together i may have to uh squirt a little more glue in there and tape that corner together until the glue kind of dries up because i just can't get it to stay together with the nails so put a little glue make sure we're having some contact back in there dripping out on the floor i'm not even so sure that the tape is going to have enough pressure that's helping once that sets up we can pull the tape off do the filling that we have to do there i wish it would close up a little better but uh this one over here actually is pretty good we can kind of come around and have a shot of that after just make sure i've got all the nails in there that i want i think i need to get two more down in that piece we're gonna move around to another corner i'm gonna demonstrate how to do a cope cut on an inside and then we're coming out with two outside corners uh around the end of a wall so we got to get reset up to do that okay so over in this corner uh is where i'm going to demonstrate the the coped corner so when you're doing a coat corner one of your pieces has to go right through you know like you won't miter it or anything this so i put this piece right through square right flat into the uh right into the corner the next piece that's going to come across here uh i had a sample and i guess i don't have it on my body so this piece is going to come across here obviously the angle is going to be a little different and we're going to cope this end what the coping does is basically uh just makes the profile butt right into the the one beside it so you're kind of making a mirror image of that profile so as far as measuring it really is measured all the same we're going to measure right from right tight in the corner to the outside which actually i already did is 24 inches so usually what i would generally like to do especially on a short piece like this is we'll prep this end first we'll do the coat before we cut it to length just in case we have to you know recut it or whatever and uh and then we've got a little bit to play with so i'm going to make the piece uh you know 30 inches long or something to start with i'll show you how to cope this end it's not as easy with this particular profile there's a lot of little jogs and stuff in this bottom edge here the upper part isn't so bad but it's not real easy to do with this style but anyways we'll show you how it's how it's done we had some comments and one of our other videos so i thought we'd better show you at least what you have to do okay so we've taken our uh one of our pieces and like i said it's it's over overextended as far as length and we've cut a normal miter looking corner on the inside okay now what i've got to do this is a coping saw by the way so that's what it should look like now what i've got to actually do is cut follow this line basically if you can see the paint line where the paint meets the raw wood basically i'm following that profile and i'm cutting back on a 45 degree angle so it's not a super easy cut to do the reason that you do cut cut it on a normal miter is to get the right profile for one thing and it also gives you a nice line to follow you can usually see it easier so i'm just going to put it try to do it in this gonna stand here so it's not moving around quite so much okay so i wanna like i said try to cut backwards from this point this is our finish point that's gonna butt into the existing piece that's up on the wall there so i just want to get started i'm just following that little line there is the lighting okay okay just like that and you'll have to make a few different cuts to to get around your profile just depending on what it is so i'm just kind of making a few straight in cuts i'm going to come around this curve now and then i can come back into these ones this blade is made with the hoop so you can kind of change what what direction the blade is facing and the hoop is basically giving it strength but you can switch the blade around to usually work around whatever your come on whatever's in the way i'm just going to cut right out to the outside and let that piece fall out now i can go back to those first two cuts i made and come across this bottom edge okay so we've got about half of it done we've actually got the easy part done i've got a little bit of a nick there but so we just want to basically continue right around there and finish the whole rest of the profile okay so once you get to that stage you can take a scrap piece and just hold the uh profile in here somehow like this to simulate the uh angles oh man i really got one of these way off here so you can see how that still isn't a perfect cut on a wood stained molding that just kind of disappears because uh you know this white on this white paint shows the joint pretty easily so that that's why i really wouldn't even bother coping a uh painted molding but anyways this is basically what you get mdf isn't that forgiving for this sort of thing either but you can see how that basically what you're trying to get is that profile there and you can do a bit of sanding or whatever you got to do if you've got a lot of these rounded cuts in there you can take a dowel if you have some the right size with some sandpaper and touch it all up i'm going to go try this up in the room just to see how it fits there and do a few little touch-ups on it probably and then then we'll cut the other end and we'll i'll show you how to put it up there okay so we've got our cope touched up as good as we could get it for this mdf and i'm going to get this nailed into place and i'll just double check how this outside corner worked out with our test piece yeah that outside corner is going to be good so we're good for length nail it up okay so now as far as uh the filling goes i'm just gonna briefly touch on that and then we'll wrap things up okay so now uh once you're you've got your crown all up in that obviously you've got to go back and touch up all those little nail holes and any spaces or anything that you have in the corners so what i like to use is just like a wall repair compound and it's just it's easy to work with it dries pretty quickly for the nail holes you can just rub it on fill the nail hole and run your finger back over and just basically smooth it right off so go around hit all your nail holes we've got one nail there that isn't quite in all the way so we're gonna have to go back with a nail set and just uh set that one and then fill it you can see where we had the tape on the corner here it actually well maybe you can't tell but it peeled the paint off there not really a big deal because we'll you go to touch the paint up anyways after we've done this filling okay so on the outside corners i use the uh wall repair compound as well on the inside corners i like to use a paintable caulking it seems like uh the inside ones are usually the ones that want to move a little bit as the house is shifting and that seasonally and if you use the paint while caulking it just kind of stretches usually better with it and stays put so your corners aren't cracked right away the outside corner you could use the caulking in here as well i find they don't seem to move for whatever reason quite as much this is that corner we had some trouble with you can see we got it closed up pretty good now we're a little better than the 16th of an inch space up here we're really good down the bottom just a little bit of an alignment issue but you can see once we get that all puttied in and allow the putty to dry the filler to dry and come back and paint it again it'll look it'll look just fine so just a matter of going around getting those all filled in i guess i don't really need to spend a lot of time you get the idea on that oops so then on an inside corner i'll maybe move over to this inside one okay so on the inside corner i just use a latex caulking and i'm just going to run a little i've got a just a fine hole just going to run a real fine bead if i can get it to start around there just like so just take your finger and mold it into place make sure it's filling up all the little gaps just get it cleaned up all nice when that gets dry then you can just come back and touch up the paint you can see there's a bit of a gap in this uh situation between the ceiling and the molding in some spots some spots when i look around the house here are a little bigger than others typically what i would do is also go around and that gap i'm not usually quite as worried about one down here if there ends up being one this one is very visible you know when you look around the room this one you pretty much got to be standing right below it to see it so i would usually take the caulking and go around here too so i'll just do a little bit of that so you'll see here as it disappears that makes quite a difference so just run your finger around there again and that just makes that gap up there disappear so we had a few little issues here today doesn't really matter what you do your project's never going to go 100 there's a lot of variables when working with crown mold like i said the the bigger the molding usually the more difficult it can be because you've got uh you know your corners aren't 100 square your ceiling and everything's in and out up and down so you're going to have this is a real world situation that's not just going to slam up there and fit perfectly every time so it takes a little bit of goofing around and farting around to get it all done but usually once you get going and you know get into it a fair ways you know you got one room done or something you've kind of got yourself into a rhythm and you've got all your your problems figured out thing that mixes most people up like i said is cutting the angles because you're you're flipping that trim upside down and you know making sure you got your angles all the right way but if you can get past that usually the rest of this is a piece of cake so okay so uh just uh we're gonna do the wrap up here on our video i just wanted to show you one more thing here that i thought of after you can see we've got a pretty long wall here obviously the trim couldn't fit corner to corner so i just thought i'd mention it in case you know you're doing a bigger room and you need to do the same thing you can see here they just cut the two pieces and butted them together put a little bit of glue in there and it makes a nice clean joint some people will actually uh cut 45 degree angles on those ends like not not this way just a straight cut but 45 so the two pieces kind of overlap a little bit to be quite honest i don't think that it really matters myself as long as you glue that joint you should be all right and then like i just showed you can use that compound on that there to fill that in so so hopefully this video helped you out at least give you a few pointers on installing crown mold and you're comfortable enough to do your own project if you're not familiar with us you can check out our website at house dash improvements.com on the website there's a bunch of articles on a few things we also have the forum there and uh so you can go into the forum ask any questions you have or uh look through the the history there to maybe somebody's already asked the same question but post up whatever you want there and i'll be sure to get back to you in a fairly short time and like you found this video on youtube um this is just our channel so you can click our channel there at the top and check out all our other videos we have quite a few other ones and also if you like what you've seen here today please click the thumbs up icon that's just below the screen thanks a lot

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 3,645,539

Rating: 4.6728988 out of 5

Keywords: ceiling, walls, house, home, improvement, diy, crown, molding, mdf, wood, miter, saw, cope, coping, joint, measure, cut, install, installation, Crown Molding, Home Improvement (Interest), Construction, Design, Interior, cornice

Id: LUnqKlCnXnI

Length: 34min 47sec (2087 seconds)

Published: Wed May 07 2014