Trim!

When we first saw our house, we knew it needed cosmetic updates...everywhere. But what does that really translate to? Two big ways to change an overall look are paint and trim! When we saw the trim, we had to decide between keeping the trim as is, painting over the trim, or ripping it out and starting from scratch.

Well, we were ambitious and excited about a big change sooo we started by ripping out the trim in the upstairs bedrooms and hallway.

Here's the upstairs and a peek at each room.

the middle bedroom with all its dark wood and chair rail

the other bedrooms!

the trim doesn't look that bad from a distance, but when you actually inspect it, you realize that it doesn't look good... it's in bad shape, with many pieces falling apart, and very narrow.

We could do so much better....

So the first thing we did when we got the keys was start tearing out all of the trim upstairs.

goodbye, chair rail! (peep the old wallpaper behind it)

I did my research, went to a few hardware stores, and landed on a door/window trim and a baseboard trim to replace it with. I went with a wider door and window trim for any space that we could. There were some areas where we had no choice but to do the same width (but with a matching, updated style to the others). I also chose a much taller baseboard. This later on revealed to have implications on other items such as new baseboard registers, which we did not think of beforehand.

I feel like professional driving this thing around the hardware store.

I put up the baseboard trim once I selected it for our first glimpse of what the final look would be... and loved it!

we spent a few days painting all of our trim in preparation for the installation

trim galore!

We then focused on patching the walls and painting each room before we went back to trim. Once it was time to start trimming, we whipped out a miter saw and set up our space.

First thing first...doorway trim!

look how different it is from the before (below).

We slowly became more confident in cutting door trim and then finished all interior doorways. The next thing we did was begin the baseboards. This proved to be slightly more challenging, partially because of the size of the large baseboards that we really wanted.

David did such a good job cutting and fitting each piece. Everything took a while and there was quite a learning curve. We knew going into this that our older home would not have straight walls and floors but it was a lot of effort.

You can see it all coming together. Believe it or not, this was the chair-rail room!

(oh and we painted the doorways, windows, and cleaned the heck out of them as best we could). Doesn't it look SO much better?!

We're still working on finalizing the baseboards in all of the bedrooms where the baseboard registers are. As I mentioned before, we had to swap out the baseboard registers and given the height of the baseboards now, we were more limited in options. The original ones we ordered looked ok but did not function properly. I found another option but we are waiting for those to arrive. Given the floors, we will have to do quarter-round trim on the baseboards as well.

Everything is coming along well. Sometimes we have harder days and it feels like everything is happening so slowly...but at the end of the day, we know it's going to look amazing once it's finished.

Next up: finish up the baseboards once registers come in, add quarter round, add window trim, touch up all trim and wall paint, paint the doors... and then we'll be finished with the bedrooms!

We're getting there!