Crown Molding & Where to Buy Picture Rail

We recently got our crown molding up in our Living Room and picture rail from Metrie! Here’s a little about it!

 

Well howdy, y’all! April slipped by, and man it was a doozy of a month! I’ve been ill for over 6 weeks with a flare-up of my Celiacs that started in April, and it has been incredibly debilitating; it’s been like having Mono and asthma and anxiety all rolled into one ridiculous illness.

It’s been difficult, especially as a mom with a toddler (tho she’s been so good thru it all!). I’ve been on an elimination diet the last 10 days to figure out the trigger food/s (fun fun), and that’s been helping, though I’m hungry! Today I at least seem to have less brain fog, so I WILL finish this post that I’ve been working off-and-on for the last four weeks! Let’s get a “house projects” update out!

The weekend I came down with this flare-up was, of course, a busy one.

We were gearing up for finally installing crown molding in our living room. Up until now it has been sitting with the paint job incomplete all around the top of the walls for more than 2 years, as we’d figured that, “Pfft, we’ll be installing the crown molding asap”.

Yeeeeah. Y’all relate?

I’d stained the moldings late last fall, and now, AT LAST, we’d worked our schedules with a woodworking genius-of-a-friend so that he could come over and teach Karl how to do a coping joint and help install and such.

A few weeks before the friend was coming, I’d also located a place that supplied PICTURE RAIL!

For some reason this has been a really difficult thing to find.

(Note: in case I’ve now totally lost you on “what the heck is picture rail?!”, it is simply a curved molding that was commonly installed in old homes to fasten wall art to with hooks and wires. It was (and still is) a great alternative for hanging pictures when you have plaster walls, and also makes it very easy to change-out or re-arrange your wall art. If you’d like to learn more, here’s a little history of picture rail.)

Home Depot had some picture rail listed online, but all of them were pre-primed, and we wanted raw wood that we could stain. When I checked further with them, they said that they don’t even carry any of the picture rail any more.

Dead end.

I knew House of Antique Hardware supplied picture rail, but it was ridiculously expensive in my book; it would have come out to be at least $3.00 per linear foot!

Then from Old House Love I learned of Metrie, a maker of crown moldings, mill work, and…picture rail! I looked up their supplier list and found a lumber yard relatively near to us. Metrie’s picture rail was $0.79 per linear foot!

Crazy, right?!

After some wall measurements and plotting out where cuts would go, I arrived at an idea of what we needed to order to have enough picture rail for both our living and dining rooms.

This is another cool thing about Metrie: you can order in any lengths up to 16 ft! Most places I’ve looked offer only lengths of 7-9 ft. So if you want to plan where the coping joints go so that they land in mostly unseen areas, you can have a lot more wiggle room with Metrie.

After ordering, it took one week for the picture rail to arrive at the lumber yard, as it’s still a rare item and not normally stocked.

I picked up the picture rail a few days before the crown molding installation was scheduled in my Mini. Yup. That little car can haul and I love it! I was even able to have baby girl ride with me to and from the lumber yard.

I’d ordered most of the railings in 8 ft lengths, but 2 of them I’d wanted in 12. A guy at the lumber yard helped me to load them up. The wood was up on my Mini’s car dash, sat in the interior aisle, and stuck out the back. Standing for a second and both of us taking in the view of the new 12 ft tail hanging out my car, I looked over at him with a, “So…what would you suggest?”

He went back into the pole barn and got some rope and tied them all into my Mini’s metal hooks that are there for such occasions, and that was that.

It was a bit of an adventure to drive with the back of my vehicle hanging (tied, but still) open.

Seeing the bottom of the road out that opening must not have phased baby girl, as she fell asleep for the entire journey home.

My plan was to stain and do the finish on the picture rail in the next 3 days so that Karl could put it up along with the crown molding in the same day. Easy peasy.

However, the day after I picked up the railings is the day I became ill.

Karl had no time to do them either between taking care of me, baby girl, and chores.

Sooo…Saturday came and the good news is the crown molding went up in less than 2 hours and looks good!

But no picture rail yet. *sigh*

It looks so much better already though; the guys did a great job!

The same day that I picked up the picture rail I also took home some samples of crown moldings from Metrie to play around with for our dining room.

Being the dining room, I definitely want something with a little more “oomphf” to it. We had 4.25 tall crown molding in the living room…

…at this moment, I’m 98% sure of using this 6-7″ crown molding 2-piece combo:

Thoughts?

Right now this is our dining room, which has one particular wall that is especially bad at the top where we had to run the new wiring for the room. The wires/holes will be hidden when the molding goes up, which will give the room another vast improvement. :)

Not to mention being able to hang wall art in here when the picture rail is up! Excited!!!

Our plan is to now do the dining room crown molding and picture rail in the dining and living rooms all in one day. I have to order the crown molding pieces, pick them up (hopefully I’ll feel well enough to drive again soon), and then stain and topcoat everything, so it’ll probably be sometime in June that we get everything up as I’m still pacing myself. It’s always a slippery slope trying to recover from a flare-up. Geh.

Hope this helps any of y’all who have also been thinking of or looking for picture rail for your home. :)