I’m pretty proud of this transformation so needless to say I’m pretty excited about sharing it with you! We have 2 columns that separate our kitchen from our family room that were pretty boring to say the least. Let me let the pictures do the talking.
This is the only good “before” photo I could find and it’s obviously taken from when the house was being built. But you get the point, right? So I wanted to fancy them up somehow! I was eyeing columns in model homes, stores, anywhere I went that had fancy columns to get ideas. I finally decided that I had to make the bottom half match the Faux Wainscoting I did throughout the front hallway and dining room, since they were so close to both of those. I thought it would bring cohesiveness to all 4 spaces.
I started by taping off the columns at the same height as the wainscoting in the rest of the house and painting the bottom a pure white in a satin finish. It’s around 39.5 high”. If you’ve seen my DIY Faux Wainscoting tutorial, I used the exact same steps to complete the bottom half to the columns. I used this chair rail molding from Lowe’s and this molding to make the boxes.
I placed a finishing nail using my nail gun at the edge of each piece of box molding. They were all cut at 45 degree mitre angles.
Now – the chair rail and box molding were cut differently. They were cut at 45 degree bevel angles. Like this picture below.
This picture below hopefully helps further illustrate the difference in angles. I filled the nail holes with wood filler and then touch up paint.
Caulked around all edges as well.
The chair rail molding was installed the exact same way as the thick molding at the top of the column shown below – using 45 degree bevel angles.
And here you can see it with my DIY crown molding as well. Molding overload!
And the final product!
So what do you think? Much better than the builder grade columns I had before, right?