Updating The Trim on the First Floor

When quarantine began and I was looking for projects to do I decided I finally wanted to tackle repainting all of our trim and door frames. Originally, the trim was a color called Swiss Coffee – a darker cream color that didn’t do our low ceilings and narrow spaces any favors. My sweet husband, who apparently loves a good challenge, took it a step further and suggested we may as well replace all of the trim while we’re at it. Simple, right?

Let me give you a back story on our home improvement history. We make a pretty great team and have tackled our fair share of projects – we uncovered and refinished the 100+ year old floors in our former home, built a sunken fire pit patio from scratch, and countless other projects over the years – but this one took it out of us! Replacing the first floor trim morphed into much more than ripping out trim and tacking up new boards. With the old trim out of the way we decided to:

• re-wallpaper the half bath

• replace the entryway and bathroom flooring

• add board and batten to the hallway, bathroom and dining room

• sand and repaint the doors

• skim and repaint the dining room walls

• replace all of the baseboards, door trim, and window trim

Stay tuned for all of those projects!!!

Baseboards

Overall, I wanted to create a much cleaner look with flat style trim. It’s clean and classic and it is WAY easier to keep clean! This style of trim is typically labeled as craftsmen or farmhouse trim. While it certainly pairs well with farmhouse vibes, flat wide trim looks great with almost every style of home. For the baseboards, we chose to use primed MDF that was 5 ½ inches wide. A wider baseboard helps draw the eye up and instantly made our rooms feel more high-end.

Door Trim

We only have 8 foot ceilings so we wanted to maximize the height of our space as much as possible. We used the same 5 ½ inch MDF for the top of our door frames and attached brick moulding above that to add height. Look at how much of a difference there is between these 2 doorways!!!

For the sides of the doors, we used 3 ½ inch MDF. To figure out exactly what we wanted, we walked through the trim area at Home Depot and played around with widths until we found a look we loved

Stay tuned to see how we check everything else off of our list. Spoiler alert, trim has the power to transform a space in BIG ways! I can't wait to show you the rest!

xoxo, L