I was the one taking all of the measurements and physically installing the pieces of molding. Joe handed me things while I was up on the ladder, and helped me out with some of the cutting. It should have been fairly cut and dry, but when you are trying to install molding in 45 and 90 degree angles, and the corners with which you are dealing are anything but 45 or 90 degrees, it makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. I'm not exaggerating either. Not even a little bit.
And the corners like these? The 22.5 degree angles or whatever they were? The bane of my existence.
Oh, yeah, and did I mention that the profile we established for the tops of the cabinets consisted of five different pieces of molding??? Yeah. We started by building what would be the center (top to bottom) of each piece. To do this we had to cut a length of 1x6 as well as an equal length of dentil molding and nail them together. To the back of this created piece, we had to nail a strip of thin stock which would provide us with a surface into which we could nail the next piece of molding which was brick. (Brick is typically used around doorways, and not on cabinets, but the profile was jut what we were looking for, so we didn't really care.) The brick had to be cut slight shorter to allow for the difference in thickness between the different pieces of molding. Once we had these four pieces assembled, we would nail them to the strips of stock we had previously nailed to the tops of the cabinets. Have I lost you yet? Once we had an entire bank of cabinets fitted with these pieces of molding, we went back to install the final piece, which was traditional crown molding. To make matters more challenging, the 1x6, dentil, and crown were all pre-finished to match our cabinets. This meant that we only had a certain amount available. If we made more mistakes than we had planned for when ordering our molding, we would have had to special order additional pieces and wait four weeks for them to arrive. :| No pressure. The brick was an after thought...we originally thought the molding would reach all the way to the ceiling...but since the ceiling was not remotely level, and the cabinets were PERFECTLY level, the distance between the cabinets and the ceiling varied quite a bit in some areas. The brick was added to ensure there would be no huge gaps at the ceiling. Unfortunately, the brick is only primed, and we now have to go back and paint it all. There is an additional piece we had purchased to paint the same color as our walls and nail to a flat area on the face of the crown, but now we think we might like the molding without that extra piece. We will decide later. Maybe.
The best part about the whole molding-installation debacle was the fact that I got to use the brad nailer Joe had gotten me for Christmas. I LOVE it. I want to put brads in everything. And I figured out that if you disable the safety with your finger, you can shoot brads across the kitchen! Not that I did, though, of course. ;)
Most of the brad holes have been filled in but I still have to fix some small gaps, and caulk the joint where the molding meets the ceiling. The gaps were mostly caused by the fact that the molding is straight, and the walls and ceilings in our 78 year old house are not, so they should be no problem to touch up. Then, with a coat of paint on the brick, we will be done!
Oh, and we also installed triple bead molding along the bottom of each cabinet. That was not nearly as hard or time comsuming.
