ORC Spring 2024 Week 3!

One Room Challenge Spring 2024 | Week 3 | Box Trim Hallway Makeover

Welcome to Week 3 of the One Room Challenge!! This week we focused on adding some classic style to the wall with box trim molding. I was so excited to get this done because I have been dreaming about adding box trim molding to a space for a long time. I love the way it looks and how it adds instant style to any space. After this week, I can honestly say this was one of the easiest DIY’s we’ve done with a major impact on the space. 

If you’ve been following along, you know we prepped these builder walls with two layers of skim coat to create a level 5 smooth surface. In my opinion, having smooth walls is key to making millwork design look its best. With the walls smoothed out, primed, and painted in our Valspar Bistro White, we were ready to pick out the trim to create the box molding. 

Left: Original builder walls with greige paint and textured walls. Right: After skim coat x 2, prime, and paint--a blank slate for the loft and hallway. Source: @lueckyhome

I tend to like more European styles with large rounded trim pieces and ornate molding profiles. Here are a few inspo pics I used when designing this space.

Left: Kasha Paris; Center: Amy Studebaker Design; Right: Anthology Creative Studio

That said, I decided in this hallway to do slightly smaller profiles and went with 11/16” base cap molding. A lot of DIYers use PVC options since it’s easy to cut with molding shears, but I prefer to work with finger jointed prime or MDF in my home. I also find it more cost effective.

If you were following along in stories on IG, you likely saw we taped out our pattern to get an idea for spacing and overall size that we liked for the boxes. For our spacing we ended up doing 23” x 36” rectangles on the bottom and  56” x 36” rectangles on top that were set apart by 6" gaps.

We found it easiest and fastest to do batch cuts for all of the lower boxes and get those installed. The boards were cut with 45 miter cuts on both ends to ensure beautiful seams.

For installation, we started by measuring from the floor, but quickly learned that since the floor and walls are not level, our lower border of the box was drifting closer and closer to the baseboard. It was pretty obvious when you took a step back that it needed fixing ASAP.  Since your eye will notice lines like the baseboard and crown the most, we started over by measuring up from the top of the baseboard to create the same distance from the top of the baseboard to the bottom border of the box. It made it easy then to move down the wall and install the lower border of all of the boxes evenly. Once the lower border was nailed in, we installed the vertical uprights of the boxes nailing them up to ¾ of the way up the board. This allowed the top to be flexible to make slight adjustments when placing the top board on to complete the square. 

With the bottom squares complete, we could move onto installing the chair rail. Like I wrote above, I like more ornate European styles of millwork, so I was really looking for a more robust chair rail. We started with a standard rail a few inches above the box, but I wasn’t sure it was enough for the whole look I wanted. We decided to install one of the upper boxes to see the complete look, and pretty quickly I could tell it needed something more to balance out the scale of the boxes on the wall.

I probably went to Lowe’s, Home Depot, and local specialty wood stores at least three separate times without any luck. I finally decided to try adding different trim pieces to the existing chair rail and landed on using a round trim piece originally meant for the entryway ceiling. It adds just enough width to balance out the scale, while maintaining that more rounded feel I was wanting in the finished look.

Now that I had the final chair rail design set, we completed the installation of the chair rail down to the end of the wall. It’s installed around 36” from the bottom of the baseboard (roughly ⅓ of the wall height) to look proportionate for the space. Like I talked about in ORC Week 2 post, we used a 22.5 miter to join the pieces down the hallway to create a seamless look.

With the chair rail complete, we moved onto finishing the installation of the top boxes, measuring from the chair rail to ensure the boxes looked level with respect to one of the main lines your eye will see. Again we installed all of the bottom pieces, then the verticals leaving the top ⅓ free, then the top pieces making adjustments to bring the top corners square. Once everything was tacked in, we were complete!

And what a difference it made in this room. The room and walls instantly look taller and more grand. It definitely elevates the space and I can’t wait to add the finishing touches of pictures and lighting once we fill the holes, caulk, and paint. 

Again, this was one of the easiest DIY’s we’ve ever done and really fast to complete. We were able to finish this installation in about an hour. The cuts were the longest part and probably took about an hour to do for all of the boxes and chair rail pieces. This is easily a one day DIY project that has a huge impact. I highly encourage you to give it a try if you want a little extra style on your walls.

Next week we are finishing door and window casing before we dive into the main event–building the playroom storage!

Follow along in stories on instragram @lueckyhome for the day-to-day on our projects.