Now that the kitchen cabinets and built-ins at the front of the house have been installed, we were able to proceed with installation of the remainder of the crown molding on the first floor. This bit of trim was the subject of lively debate among (and between) us, the GC, our first architect, Ben, and our current architect, Natalie. Basically, the molding spec’d by Ben in the plans turned out to be humongous.

The GC was so skeptical about the selection that Dave sent me the following picture one day to confirm that this was really the stuff we wanted to install:

Frankly, we really didn’t know whether this was, indeed, what we wanted. The questions from the GC and the noble attempts by Natalie to identify an alternative drove us to reconsider the molding. This is how the crown molding was spec’d in the first floor living area elevation:

The key element is the scale of the molding relative to the beam up front and the bulkhead at the back (the top elevations in the plan above). The molding lends weight and substance to these elements, and our discussions with Ben affirmed this.

Moreover, based on our interest in having windows as tall as possible, the crown was selected to descend from the ceiling to the top of the windows, with no casing. If we went with smaller crown, the space between the bottom of the crown and the top of the windows would be awkward.

Yet, still, we questioned the choice, to the point of checking out the look one night after work to try to resolve our angst:

In the end, we trusted the initial design. Good thing – it worked out perfectly. This is the scene right before the molding started snaking across the ceiling:

And after: