How to install crown moulding (and use a gallon of caulk in the process)

We are not by any means DIY experts. We are the learn-as-you-go-make-a-zillion-mistakes kind of DIYers.

But life wouldn't be as exciting if we were "perfect" DIYers.

One of the things I wanted to do for our laundry room make over was add crown moulding. Yes. crown moulding in a laundry room. Silly you may say. Well yes it's silly, but it was more of a practice for installing crown moulding in other places in the house.

We have beautiful, thick moulding all around our house downstairs, but the previous owner that built the house must have ran out of money when it came to the upstairs because there's zero moulding upstairs.

So I picked the smallest room (our laundry room is 5 X 5 1/2) and thought it would be an easy practice.

W.R.O.N.G.

Let's start by saying we did follow the old adage of cut once measure twice. I actually took it a step further and made hubby measure 10 times and cut once. Everyone does that right???

We got it into our teeny tiny laundry room and could barely get it up. It was too long. You should have seen the commotion of two people in a hot and small space trying to make this thing fit. I'll let you imagine the conversation in your head because it would not be appropriate to type those words on the internet! 

Hubbs measure and went back downstairs to cut again. Slowly we realized our walls are not straight and we kept having this problem. So the best solution was to cut it too short. I was not happy.  We used my nail gun that hubbs got me for Christmas and nailed it in.

This is what we ended up with. 

hmmm...every corner was like this. You can see from the picture just how uneven the walls are! We had gaps at the top and bottom in various depths and the corners were just awful.

It sat like this until the weekend when I could no longer take it. 

I grabbed a tube of paintable caulk and a Bondo Spreader.  This really wasn't meant for the job but I needed something long and skinny! I also had to fill all the nail holes from the nail gun.

You don't even want to know how many times I had to caulk the HUGE gaps in the corners. The walls were so uneven in some spots I could stick my finger up behind the gap. It took many layers of caulk to cover. 

After I spent the entire weekend  a few hours caulking I sanded it down and painted it with white trim paint by Behr. 

After it dried, you seriously couldn't even see that there used to be huge gaps here! 

I do still need to touch up around the edges of the moulding where we knicked the blue paint. 

Overall I'm REALLY happy with the results. Yes that gap in the paint is still there on the back wall. I'll get to my shelving solution someday.

This project hasn't cost us a dime yet because I used a gift card to buy the moulding!

Here's the breakdown of costs so far. 

	What it would have cost	What I spent
Paint (leftover from dining room)	$25	$0
Moulding (used giftcard)	$22	$0

Despite all that went wrong, I think we will still attempt to keep going with the crown moulding upstairs. I'm glad we "practiced" on the laundry room. I think it's made a huge improvement!

You can see our progress on the laundry room here.

Maybe I should have titled this post how NOT to install crown moulding :) 

Have you had  good experience installing crown moulding?