Perhaps my favorite detail in the great room is the very subtle change in the molding. Backing up a bit to tell the story…
For some unfathomable reason (maybe they got the stuff cheap), the POs used finger-jointed casing instead of actual floor molding in the great room and foyer. The stuff is normally used around door frames and is pretty flimsy, so not only was it very thin compared to typical baseboard moldings, it also didn’t match the rest of the house. All those horizontal lines also cluttered up the aesthetic, but then “cluttered’ seemed to be the POs’ design forte.
Fast-forward to when the teak flooring was refinished. New molding was installed and I opted for simple throughout the north hall and foyer alcove, but in the great room I went even simpler, with the shoe–as in shoe molding. I have no idea why it’s called that and I’m too sleepy right now to search the interwebs for the answer, but shoe molding is a super-thin, super-simple bit of molding. Similar to quarter round, shoe is shorter, or more “squat.”
This is what it looked like when the prep and priming was going on. When I talked with the flooring crew about new molding options, I got the idea for how shoe molding would really aid in cleaning up the cluttered lines and boxiness of the space. Instead of painting the floor molding in the great room white, like elsewhere in the house, it would instead be painted the same color as the walls. The walls would just melt into the floor.
So while the painters had painted the trim around the windows and support pillars earlier (between the exterior cleanup and chimney strip-down project), finishing the shoe molding to match the walls actually made the prep and paint work a bit easier. Once all the tape and masking paper was removed, things looked just like I imagined they would.
Here’s what I mean:
See? No more white lines between the walls and floor.
More examples of how it all works in the finished space.
And finally, here’s what the space looked like when we first looked at the house; shortly after moving in; and earlier today.
