Steve Batie: Without fussing, fuming

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A fairly quick, fairly inexpensive way to spruce up a room with a little “architectural interest” is to add crown molding.

But it didn’t used to be that way.

Not so many years ago, installing crown molding in the dining room involved finding a talented finish carpenter, waiting patiently for the months it took for your name to reach the top of the list, and nervously watching the fussing and fuming that went into fitting each skinny strip of woodwork just right.

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Nowadays, such spiffing is easily within the reach of  the average handyperson.

And it’s all thanks to the wonder of urethane foam — and corner molding.

A buddy of mine has been happily applying it to one room after another of his bungalow for about a year. He shows so little sign of stopping that it wouldn’t surprise me to find crown molding topping off his utility room before he’s through.

The challenge of traditional wooden molding — and it’s still readily available to remodeling purists — is fitting carefully coped joints into the inside corners of the room and carefully mitered joints into the outside corners.

Many samples are made.

Much swearing is heard.

Many tiny, but expensive, strips of wood wind up in the scrap bin.

Then, a few years ago, some bright designer came up with the idea of creating inside and outside corner blocks, decorative elements that could be whittled and sanded to fit into any “almost-90-degrees” corner.

(To be honest, it was a variation on a very old idea: To avoid having to miter trim — and deal with the eventual gaps that would result with time — the Victorians designed square blocks of wood to go into the corners of doors and windows. Rosettes were very popular.)

With the corner blocks in place, it takes little more skill than that needed to operate a tape measure to fit the crown molding between them.

It’s all butt joints. No need to own a coping saw, much less learn how to use one.

Still, you did have to cut those butt joints, and sometimes the angle between the molding and the corner isn’t precisely 90 degrees.

(In every house I’ve ever owned, nothing was precisely 90 degrees.)

The trick was to back-bevel the molding, cutting it a tad less than 90 degrees so its facing edge — the one people could see from the living room sofa — would look perfect even if its back edge didn’t.

You could do the job with a back saw and a sliding miter box, but it was ever so much easier with a power miter saw.

But that scared a lot of would-be handyfolks off.

Fussy finish carpenters still could find plenty of work.

And then along came urethane foam.

Foam is wonderful stuff.

It cuts and sands with all the same tools you’d use for wood, but you can work it with a utility knife if you want to.

It won’t chip or splinter — although it can be dented.

It will never rot, which makes it fantastic for exterior use.

It’s available in densities and weights ranging from the plastic foam you’re used to seeing in coffee machine cups to materials beefy enough to mimic the lumber it replaces.

And it’s sold in more and more different styles of molding every year.

You’ll find it racked right beside that wooden stuff at the home improvement store.

Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.