Crown and Arch Molding or is it Moulding

Shortly after we moved into our house and we were writing lists of things that we would like to do to our new house, Joe mentioned that he would really like crown molding in the living room area.  It has been somewhere on the to-do list since then, roughly 5 years.  I am not complaining, in the same time he has completely gutted and remodeled our lake house, and done several projects for this house.  He decided that while I was out of town this summer, he would get it done.  About last January, I decided that it would be nice to have molding on my archways.  When we had the house built, someone mentioned that we could get arches put in, and so we had them put in in two different entryways in our house.  Now that I have had them for a while, I have decided I don't actually care for arches, but in January, I saw a few pictures online of arches with molding.  I fell in love and decided that I had to do that myself. Putting molding on arches is quite challenging, however, because the molding has to be flexible so that it can curve around the arch.  I found a website online that sold flexible molding and decided I could just do it myself, so that it wouldn't be a burden to Joe and it would get done on my time frame.  The website molding was very expensive, but it came quickly, but what they sent was not what I ordered.  Luckily I only ordered for one of the two archways, so when I called them back, they sent more molding of the correct kind, but didn't make me return the first order.  Since the molding is super expensive, I used the incorrect stuff on the back of the arches (i.e. coming in from the back way) and saved myself a ton of money.  I quickly started painting the molding and then realized I was in over my head.  It didn't help that Joe was pointing out how awful my painting job was and how he didn't think I could do it.  Finally I enlisted his help, but it had to be on his time schedule.

 

Fast forward to this summer.  (His time schedule wasn't interested in doing it before then). While I was out of town, he was able to put up the crown molding, but I had to do the caulking.  It looked so good.  I had to request that for my birthday and anniversary combined he finish it.  (I pretty much didn't ask for anything else- I know how these things work).  Many grumpy nights later it is finally, FINALLY done. 

 

I don't have a before of the crown molding, I didn't think to get one.  Here is the arch before:

 And the other arch, they are both in the same great room area, so they had to match.

 And after.  One of the tricks was to find something that was flexible that could go on the inside of the arch since the corners of the wall are rounded, we needed to have something solid to meet the edge of the molding.  We finally found some plastic bead board that was flexible enough, but when we first nailed it in, it shattered the bead board, we had to redo it and use glue to glue the beadboard up.  The other wall is about 1/3 as thick as this one (obviously not a load bearing wall), so we used a different plastic substance on it. 

Here is a close up of the molding detail at the "corners" of the arch.

On the crown molding, since the corners at our house are rounded, Joe had to do special corners like this:  I can't even begin to understand the angles that he had to cut to get those right, but somehow he figured it out.

It looks SOOOO good, I am so glad it is done.  I do have two things I learned from this project- my husband is superman, (well I already knew that), and don't ever try this yourself at home, just pay a little extra and hire it done.