Crown Molding for Cabinets, the Dummy Version

crown molding on cabinets

The Antisocial Network DIY staffers have a sort of general rule: the more "elegant" a DIY project is supposed to look, the harder it is to complete. Rustic planters? easy. Wainscoting? medium. Crown molding? a pain in the tuchus. That's why we look carefully every time we find some self-appointed freelancer with a J-school degree (or the equivalent) trying to explain how to install crown molding. You know, like the time we found Jennifer Eblin telling eHow.com readers "How to Install Crown Molding on Thomasville Cabinets." Or so she said...

Eblin's claimed "MA in historic preservation" from SCAD (weird: that's where Greyson Ferguson was schooled) didn't seem to be much help for this assignment. Perhaps she skipped all the hands-on carpentry stuff in preservation? We think that because Jenny tells us things like

"Measure the height of each cabinet with a measuring tape. Measure the sides of each cabinet and write down those measurements. Depending on the type of cabinets and the size of your kitchen, you might have different-sized cabinets." We were fine with the "measure the sides" bit, but why on earth do we need to measure the height? And then there are Jennifer's instructions for measuring and cutting the molding: "Transfer the measurements onto the crown molding pieces with a pencil... Cut the crown molding into individual pieces: one for each side of the cabinet, following your measurements. Cut a 45-degreee [sic] angle on the ends of each piece."

Wow: it's that simple... which must mean that installing the molding is just as easy, right? Eblin says,

"Hold one piece of crown molding along the top of the cabinet. Attach a 1-inch wood nail, making sure that the nail goes through the crown molding and into the cabinet. Attach three additional pieces of crown molding to the cabinet, lining the pieces up together." "Attach" a nail? really? Just one nail? And we wondered if the moronic content editor who okayed this bull happened to notice that Eblin was putting molding on all four sides, including the side screwed to the wall... yeah, sure. And then there's, "Repeat [the previous step] on each cabinet in the kitchen. Make sure that the side of the molding sits even with the edge of the cabinet and that the mitered edges touch each other without any gaps."

Does this idiot even know that cabinets are hung in a row? And that one long piece of molding will cover the entire front? Apparently not.

That doesn't even come close to instructions for installing crown molding, which is – as we mentioned before – a royal pain. There's nothing at all about inside and outside corners, nothing about how to lay the molding in the miter saw, nothing about coping corners. In other words, Eblin had not idea what she was talking about and the people who've read the copy written by our Dumbass of the Day don't, either.

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DDIY - CABINETS