Hi, I am Bill Frishman with BGB Builders. Today, our project is installing crown molding, and right now we are going over material selection and estimation and figuring out how much material you are going to need. Lets go over material selection first. Crown molding typically comes in sizes between two and six inches. It can be as plain as a molding like this, which will have just one beveled edge here and a coped edge -- that is pretty typical crown mold. Goes up to things little more ornamental with dental blocking. Those are the different sizes and types of crown molding. You are going to want to pick a molding that matches the dcor of your house. Now people typically will just do a one-piece crown molding, but if you want to add different pieces to the crown molding, you can make a three-piece crown molding, which would be done using a piece of base that I have here held upside down, putting the crown molding over it, and running a piece of OG mold spaced typically about two inches below. Thats a good three-piece crown molding detail. The type of wood that you are going to want to pick out is another thing to think about. If you are going to use a paint or a stain-grade wood, thats a consideration you are going to want to make before you buy the wood if you are going to paint or stain it. Stain-grade wood is more expensive, but you are going to need to use that if you are going to stain the molding. You can use finger-jointed molding if you are going to paint it. You can also use a primed wood if you are going to paint it. I do recommend doing that if you are going to be working in a finished condition such as your own house if you are living there now, or if you are doing new construction, you might as well go with raw wood since you are going to paint everything around it; you will save a little bit of money.

The last thing we are going to think about with material selection is the quality of the wood. With a real wood product, you typically are going to be working with a pine finger jointed product. With that product, you are going to want to make sure you dont end up with any knot holes, the knots that you find in trees, as well as make sure the wood is straight. A lot of times, hardware stores these days carry composite materials that are synthetic, and you dont have to worry about those things but you do pay a little more. The next thing we are going to talk about is estimating how much of this material you are going to need. What you are going to want to do is measure the linear footage of your room all the way around; start on one end and come all the way around until you are back where you started. You are going to want to add 10% to that number just for waste, the pieces that are going to be left over after you make your cuts, as well as, I recommend another 10% for the mis-cuts and mistakes that are bound to happen pretty much in every project. This way you wont have to go running back to the hardware store.

Coming up next in our crown molding project, we are going to over some measuring techniques.