Builder-grade houses all over Gwinnett County came with the minimum in trim: a thin baseboard, flat door casings, and a bare corner where every wall meets the ceiling. Crown molding in a living room, chair rail and wainscoting in a dining room, or taller baseboard through the main floor is one of the few upgrades that makes a 1990s house in Lawrenceville or Suwanee look custom without moving a wall. Trim is unforgiving work, though. Every gap at a corner shows, and every wall and ceiling in a house that has settled for twenty or thirty years is a little out of true.
Crown molding, corner by corner
Crown sits at an angle between the wall and the ceiling, which makes it the hardest trim to install well. Inside corners are coped: the end of one piece is cut to the profile of the other, so the joint stays closed as the house swells through a humid summer and dries out over the winter. Outside corners are mitered and glued. Long walls take a scarf joint over a stud, and a ceiling that dips gets a bead of caulk sized to the gap instead of a molding forced flat against it. In houses with a two-story family room, common from Duluth to Buford, the crown usually runs through the first-floor rooms and ends in a clean return where the ceiling climbs.
Chair rail, wainscoting, and baseboard
Chair rail runs about a third of the way up a dining room wall and keeps chair backs off the paint. Below it, wainscoting can be raised panels, flat panels framed with applied molding, or beadboard, all built from stock moldings and panels cut on site. New baseboard goes in at a taller profile than the builder's and is nailed into the studs and the bottom plate, with the top edge caulked to the wall. Everything is set with a finish nailer, the holes filled, and the joints caulked, so the trim is ready for paint; painting can be part of the same job or left for your own brush.
Materials for a Georgia house
Pine and poplar take paint well and hold a crisp edge. Primed MDF is smooth, less expensive, and stable in a dry room, but it swells when it gets wet, so it stays out of bathrooms and away from exterior doors. Polyurethane crown is light and does not move with the humidity, which helps on long runs. Wood trim should sit inside the house for a few days before it goes up so it can adjust to the indoor air, which matters in a Georgia July.
How a trim job is quoted
A room or two of crown, a dining room of chair rail, or new baseboard in a hallway is a common request, and trim that is split or water-stained can be replaced during the same visit. The walk-through measures each room, and the written quote lists the rooms, the moldings, and the paint-ready finish before any molding is bought for a Snellville split-level or a Peachtree Corners townhome.