The Importance of Molding and Trim in a Room

Molding and trim are important details in a room’s architecture. Trim includes material that goes around windows, doors, where walls meet floors and ceilings, and as a wall cover. This includes baseboards, chair rails, door and window casings, and wainscoting. Molding is a type of trim that’s typically more decorative, such as crown molding that adds a visual flourish where the wall and ceiling meet.

You can use trim accents to elevate the style of any room and add functional protection. Whether you’re making improvements in your home or business, read about the importance of molding and trim in a room.

1. Enhance the Room’s Design

Thoughtful interior design transforms a room from a blank slate to a place you want to spend time in. You can use trim to enhance a room’s style and create a mood you want. Just as colors, materials, and fabric work together to create a room’s look, trim and molding play a big part as well.

The trim’s material, placement, size, and styling can contribute to the room’s overall look. Wainscoting has a dramatic impact on the room’s style. Adding paneled wainscotting to a dining room makes it look more elegant. In contrast, cosmetic diamond plate wainscoting has an industrial look that’s perfect for a home gym or finished garage.

You can change out a room’s existing trim to reinforce a more personalized design. Many homes come with standard white or off-white baseboards. If you have a highly specialized room, such as a man cave, changing these standard features to match the new aesthetic can set the room apart from the rest of the house.

2. Make the Room Feel Finished

If a room feels blank or empty, don’t rush to fill it with stuff. Sometimes a room just needs a finishing touch such as trim or molding. These details add personality with a flourish to any space, creating a more complete look.

Similar to how art adorns walls, molding creates more dimension on walls and along edges. Crown molding draws the eyes upwards and can make a room look taller than it is when it’s sized in the right proportions for the space. And trim around windows and doors helps these everyday architectural features stand out and look fantastic.

And if you want to highlight a special feature of a room, stylized trim can help. Use diamond plate trim around your home bar to give the bar a sleek, casual look and help it fit seamlessly into the room. You can coordinate the trim with embellishments, like diamond plate outlet covers.

3. Make Your Home More Appealing

The third reason why molding and trim are important in a room is that they make your home more appealing to buyers. Whether or not you plan to sell your home soon, décor ideas that make your home more attractive are worth your attention. In some cases, trim and molding can increase your home’s value. But even if these touches don’t raise the bottom line, they will likely help you sell your home faster.

Since trim enhances interior design and helps a room feel more complete, you can think of it as eye candy for potential buyers. These details help set your home apart by adding character to each space. You can use trim to create transitions from room to room or to tie the look of rooms together.

One useful trick for trim is to coordinate your bathroom fixtures. If you install a brand-new bathtub that doesn’t match the color of your sink or toilet, it might make your sink and toilet look old and dingy. Use trim that’s a couple of shades darker than the walls, or a different but complimentary color, to draw the eye away from the mismatched fixtures.

4. Cover Gaps

While trim protects walls and corners from getting bumped or worn down, it also serves another practical purpose: covering gaps. Homeowners use trim to cover the gap where the floor meets the walls, or around doors and windows.

If you have hardwood floors in your home, you need to maintain a little bit of space along the perimeter of the wood so that it can expand and contract. When there’s not enough space, the floor can become uneven as the wood cracks. Adding molding over the gap makes the floor and wall look like they fit seamlessly for a better look.

Trim also prevents gaps from collecting debris. Dirt, grime, pet and human hair, and dust can settle into gaps. To avoid the nightmare of having to clean such a small space, install a trim that covers the gap.

And covering gaps also insulates air and sound. Trim prevents air from moving into or out of a room, helping to keep the room as cool or as warm as you want and reducing your HVAC system’s workload. And just like trim helps prevent air from escaping or entering a room, it helps to muffle sound.

5. Protect Walls and Corners

Finally, molding and trim protect walls and corners. Chair rail is a great example of trim that’s both decorative and protective. Chair rail is horizontally laid trim placed three to four feet above the floor, and it was originally designed to protect walls from getting hit by chair backs. It’s often placed in dining rooms, breakfast nooks, and living rooms.

Placing a durable material over the edges of a corner protects them from getting worn down or bent. Outsider corners, such as on pillars, placed in high-traffic areas like hallways can get damaged as people pass by or when hit by furniture. Wrap these areas with corner wall guards that protect these exposed corners from dents, scratches, and chipped drywall.

Protecting the walls and corners of a room will preserve a great look and help you save money. It’s often easier and cheaper to replace a section of trim than to fix drywall damage.

Protect and Decorate With CutsMetal

Use durable and beautiful diamond plate molding from CutsMetal to enhance a room’s interior design. It’s easy to cut and apply these decorative and protective pieces to your walls. Contact us to find the right diamond plate trim for your space.