Questions about the staircase moulding in our entryway have been popping up in my inbox pretty regularly since I first shared this space in our new-ish home over a year ago.
Can’t believe we’ve been here that long already! Anyhow, I thought a blog post might be helpful.
I knew I wanted some kind of floor-to-ceiling moulding in this space right from the start. Classic but not overly traditional is what I was aiming for with regard to the trimwork throughout the house. And so in the entry, I opted to create a simple recessed panel mould look using 3 1/2 inch flat trim boards that are 3/4″ thick.
This was obviously not a DIY project of mine. The trim workers that worked on our new build get all the credit for bringing my pencil scribbles on paper to life. They were so awesome to work with, and I learned so much from watching them!
The hardest part of a moulding project can often be the math. And in this case, I wanted the moulding to wrap three walls of our vaulted entry foyer. But there are doors and openings to work around on all three walls, so things did get a little tricky.
My best tip when it comes to planning out wall moulding is to start with the wall that will get the most attention. So in our case, I started with the staircase wall. This is the wall that draws the eye in from the front door. It’s also the wall you notice the most no matter if you’re coming or going. It’s the focal wall of the room.
So I based the spacing I wanted for each panel on this wall. Playing with some rough pencil sketches on paper, I decided I wanted to have an odd number of panels (5). And with the door at the top of the stairs on this wall, I wanted the panels to be at least a little wider than the door opening.
To figure out how far apart to space the vertical pieces, I took the width of the wall and subtracted the width of the boards (3 1/2 inches) multiplied by the number of boards (6). There’s a vertical board in both corners. Then I took that number and divided by the number of panels (or spaces between each board) I wanted (5). And that gave me the distance between each vertical board.
Figuring out the placement for the horizontal boards was a little easier. The first board (the bottom board) was placed in line with the baseboard at the turn of the stairs. It just made the most sense to me to start by squaring things off there.
At that point I could have taken the remaining height of the wall and divided it up evenly. But when I was playing with the layout on paper, it looked odd to me to have the top three sections evenly spaced and the bottom section not. It just felt off balance to me. So, I decided to make the middle two sections even squares which makes the bottom and top look more balanced with them being rectangular shapes, even though the spacing on the bottom is slightly smaller than the spacing on top.
My eye reads it as rectangle-square-square-rectangle. So even though the math isn’t totally precise for the placement of the horizontal boards on the staircase wall, it feels right to my eye.
Once the math was figured for this wall, we just mirrored the measurements on the opposite wall. And for the front door entry wall, we continued the spacing from the adjacent wall, although here you can see where the spacing was cut off in the corner by the doors.
Here again, on the entryway door wall, I could have redone the math to create even sections on this wall, but it felt better to me to continue the same spacing that is on the other two walls. Being that there is trim around the doors, that corner where there is just a sliver of a panel doesn’t bother me at all. It’s hardly even noticeable. Whereas I think if the panels were perfectly spaced and skinnier on that one wall, it would feel disjointed from the other two.
But in truth, I don’t really think there is a right or a wrong here. I feel like a lot of what you do with regard to trimwork is about what looks good to your eye. So that is going to be different for everyone.
My second best tip, bust out a pencil and notebook paper. It helps SO much! And you’d be surprised how much easier it is to do the math on a moulding project when you have a pencil in your hand. Or maybe that’s the Gen X in me shining through. 😉 Either way I really do think it helps!
Moulding has such a huge impact in a space. And when you’re using simple materials, it’s often more affordable than you might think. I’ve got a couple of moulding projects I plan to tackle this year, and I can’t wait to get started!
I hope this post was helpful! Let me know if you have any questions!
