Juno - charm question **Pics added**

jennylove1084

I wonder if you know the answer to this.  Most of the windows at our house have crown molding on top.  The rooms that don't are living, dining and our room.  We thought it maybe got removed sometime to modernize the house, but the doorways still have the trim.

I was at my grandmas house and she is also missing the crown on some windows but she's lived there since 1957 so it would have had to be removed prior.

Our house was built in 1928. Why would crown be missing on some windows?

Also what ate your thoughts on matching the crown and adding it? Yes or mistake?   I know we can bc our bathroom remodel was matched to original woodwork. 

Pretend this is a window - most have the crown on top:

This is what dining, living room and our bedroom windows look like - if they removed the crown they did a great job, no evidence of it:

This is the new woodwork in our reno'ed bathroom:

 

You make a good point though if we want to refinish the trim, we won't be able to match the stain.  Under the paint it looks like a super dark walnut.

juno

That's weird.  I have no explanation for removal.  If anything, I would think the side casings would have been removed/damaged to access weight pockets.  Sorry I'm not helpful there. 

So what's left up there?  Is there any sort of molding?  Does it not match the side casings?

If it was my house, I'd do my best to match as long as it didn't involve tearing out anything that looked original.  I'm having a hard time picturing what you're describing, so I'm not 100% sure what I'd do with it.  We have two time periods in our house: 1910ish and 1925ish (remodel).  For our older, more Victorian moldings, DH replicated the molding profile himself after finding something close in a salvage yard.  I wouldn't recommend that for someone new to wood working (it involves cutting the profile into a saw blade and then using that to scratch the profile into the trim).

For our remodel where we ripped out moldings from 1960-1990, we had new trim milled.  For the baseboards, we took them a sample slice from a piece we had to remove, and for the casings, we gave them a drawing with exact measurements and angles.  They charged an $80 setup fee per profile plus the board food cost of the wood.  Super easy.

Before you have it milled, you need to figure out what sort of wood to use.  If the existing trim is all painted, you'll have to get some paint off of it to find out.  Even then, you may not be able to tell if you don't know much about wood.  The shop where you get milled should be able to help you ID it. 

Another problem is matching the stain.  We've had a hell of a time matching stain on old trim to stain on new trim.  We've had to start giving the new wood a base stain of a different color to approximate the color of the bare old wood, then put the desired stain over both.  You may just have to use a lot of test pieces to get close.  Ours isn't perfect, but we're not professionals, so we got what we paid for   I think a professional stainer/painter could do it much better.

If you do plan to strip, I wouldn't consider trying to match trim until everything is stripped down.

jennylove1084

Hmm.  I'll take pictures of the 3 different windows tonight and post them for you!

juno

That's the same as our c. 1925 trim!  All our foyer windows with it have the crown.  I have no explanation for you, and neither does DH.  But that doesn't mean there isn't one; we're just learning as we go.  I looked through my bungalow books, and there are lots of examples of the same trim, none with missing crown.  Every example I see with the little decorative bead of trim above the opening (sorry, I don't know the term) is combined with the crown molding.

My opinion is that it looks a little unfinished without the trim and I'd try to match the rest if it was mine (though the priority would depend on what else I had to do).  Bonus, by adding it, you aren't damaging anything.  If it turns out to be a mistake, you don't like it, or you figure out why it might have been done, it's easily reversible to the "original" condition.  So I don't think you'd go wrong either way.

If you use enough stain and maybe a gel stain, you'll be able to get it close, especially for such a small piece in a different plane from the other wood. 

If you wanted to save money, a miller might have a similar, though not exact, profile already so that you don't have to pay the blade fee; you'd just have to pay for the matching wood species.  Lots of places around here have pre-set profiles for common old trims.  I don't think it would be that noticable if it was just slightly different.

DH is skeptical that it's walnut, but I'm not really.  He's just used the the houses around here that are all redwood and Douglas fir.  They used whatever grew commonly in the area.  I have a colleague in New Jersey that likes to talk old houses with me, and the old houses there have completely different woods.  Just have the miller look at what you have already.

Or maybe you just decide you want some high and wide curtains and don't worry about the window trim since it will be covered most of the time anyway   I have lace curtains everywhere, so I worry about my window trim a lot.

I know you mentioned you wanted to strip wood elsewhere in the house; were you planning to strip the bathroom too?  If that's new construction, do you know what wood it is?  The crown looks different to me, so I'm guessing the trim was stock molding from somewhere, rather than milled to match.  Maybe it's just the pic or my eyes.  It may not be stain grade and even if it is I'm guessing it doesn't match everything else, which may not matter to you.  However, I don't think stripping the bathroom is necessary.  Having a white bathroom and kitchen with stained wood in the rest of the house was common.  The Sanitarians had everyone convinced that rooms with plumbing needed to be white. 

jennylove1084

I don't know what's in the bathroom but it will have to stay painted.  The stripping terrifies me.  Mystery of missing crown molding unsolved  

juno

jennylove1084:

I don't know what's in the bathroom but it will have to stay painted.  The stripping terrifies me.  Mystery of missing crown molding unsolved  

  Sorry.  My totally uninformed guess would be that someone wanted window treatments that didn't work with the molding.  If you strip the wood, you may find some evidence of removal (filled nail holes).