Shay Hawkins
Adding picture frame molding and painting it all one color and sheen is a great way to update a room on a budget. This wall treatment completely elevates a space and gives it such an upscale look for not much money.
I got the inspiration for this project from several bloggers and others online, but especially from Alisa at A Glass of Bovino. I loved how her bedroom turned out so much that I could totally see this working for us in the master sitting room. We used stock real wood picture frame molding from Home Depot to get the look. We did the basic chair rail molding at 36″ from the floor and decided on a 5″ spacer board for the big wall, so those are the measurements we went by.
I had painted the walls and ceiling in Moody Blue two years ago, but this extra picture frame molding treatment really took it over the top pretty. First, I want to give a huge shout out to Ryobi for gifting me this sliding miter saw. On Alisa’s tutorial, she shares a diagram showing how she came up with the box measurements and that helps a lot in figuring out how to do this.
To make it easier to get right, we used Frogtape to tape up the cut boards in the right spot before we nailed them all in.
Mark is really good at all of this and we both worked at keeping it spaced correctly and level. We used the 5″ spacer board on all sides and after taping the molding up, it looked good to us so we started finding studs and nailing it into place.
It was amazing how visually the added molding made the room so much prettier. And the smaller boxes at the bottom got 6 more shorter verticals cut at the same time.
You can also use these measurements for the smaller walls too, at least some of them to save time with the cutting process.
I did the same thing Alisa did and all the very top boxes all line up with each other so they are all 5″ from the crown molding all around the room.
I also painted the light switches and the outlets that showed so nothing white would jump out. Some people do the molding in a different finish than the walls, but I thought Satin was nice for all of it, so I just kept it all the same.
We added one little box molding on the small wall between the closet doors and it looks really good. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to add picture frame molding to a room.
