So you want to flip a room in your home and you want to add box trim, but you’re not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place! I recently flipped my guest bedroom from an all-white, plain wall, art overload space to an elevated, old money style retreat for guests in our home! Through good old fashioned paint, box trim, chair rail and some careful planning, we turned this space into the guest room of my dreams!
Ideation
As with any project, you’ll need to figure out exactly what you want! I love Pinterest for this kind of thing, but you can find ideas anywhere! Magazines, design books, the internet, TV, etc. are all great places to find inspiration. The specific inspiration for the vibe of our guest room came to me while watching Baby Mama (such a good movie, right?). Tina Fey’s bathroom is a two tone, layered designed space. The style is almost giving early 2000s in an expensive home. And “old money” mixed with “English country” is kind of my vibe, so I ran with it haha.
Some things you’ll need to think about – how do you want to feel in the space? How much work do you want to do? What is the design vibe (colorful, minimal, traditional, etc.)? And then as you accumulate specific design ideas like box trim, paint colors and art, ask yourself if this element you like works with your answers to the above questions.
Something equally as important is to consider how this space ties in with the rest of your house! Typical design rules say that you should have a theme that flows from room to room in your house in order to create a cohesive vibe throughout. This just basically means you need to pick 3-4 colors that you’ll use in some capacity and some shade in every room. For me, all of the rooms in our house have brown (floors), white, green and then a small touch of some shade of a neutral red. Once you have a few pieces and colors that you know you want to roll with, I recommend putting together a mood board. Below is the mood board I put together for this project
Your mood board could be more simple than this with just some swatches, a pillow, art and maybe a piece of furniture or a rug. It could also just look like a few screenshots laid on top of one another. I use Goodnotes to plan my mood boards because it has a cool free-draw cropping feature so I can cut out just the very specific things I like from different photos.
A great thing about putting together a mood board is that it tells you whether your ideas all flow together. I was able to swap in and out different comforters and pillows to figure out what I liked. And the rug in the photo is actually the rug we already had in the room, so I was able to know that some of our current pieces in the room worked well with the new design and I was able to save money!
This phase also helps you solidify more specific aspects of the project. This mood board forced me to pick a general design of the box trim at the bottom of the wall and pick a specific color from Sherwin Williams. You get the point, this is the time to get specific to make the actual implementation so much easier and takes all of the guess work out of the equation farther down the line.
Get Specific
Although we picked some designs and a layout, we need to get even more specific here. You know you want to paint the room a soft white, but what exact paint color will you use? Do you have a favorite brand? Again, I recommend using Pinterest here for paint colors, because you can find photos of the paint being used in different lighting (website reviews are great for this too!). And maybe you know you want to put box trim or chair rail in, but what exactly do these measurements look like? Do you want several sequential narrow boxes? Or do you want 1-2 large boxes per wall with a small box below? Use your inspiration photos to guide you and then get into the room to figure out what will fit your vision.
For example, the photos of the chair rail + box trim that I saw and loved all had the chair rail above the height of the headboard. So I had a guide for where I wanted the chair rail and then played around with painters tape till I found a height I liked. Once I did that, I played around with painter’s tape to figure out how tall and wide I wanted the boxes to be and the distance I wanted between them. You get the idea, do anything you need to do until the next step is to actually do it!
Since apparently, this has turned into a “Box Trim 101” blog, I want to give some tips and recommendations so you avoid the mistakes I made! I’ve covered box trim cutting, nailing, nail hole filling and seam caulking in other posts, but this one is all about planning! We decided to put boxes that were narrow and all the same size along the bottom half of the wall. But the key here is to plan the distance between boxes using the main wall! Emphasis on the MAIN WALL. The main wall is where your eye goest first. These boxes should fit perfectly on the wall and then that way you can extend it to other walls. If the boxes don’t quite fit on the secondary and tertiary walls, it’s no big deal! You can leave the empty space or create a smaller or half box on the secondary walls. This is all to say because if your main wall doesn’t fit your boxes, you’ll wind up with a half box bleeding through the corner and onto another wall. This can look good, but it’s much less clean and a lot more complicated.
Another example of this could be that you know you want a cozy nook in the room. Okay, awesome! What size chair would fit? Do you want it to be a sleeper sofa? Do you already own the art you want to hang or the lamp for the space? If not, get to looking (I recommend always perusing Facebook Marketplace first!).
Once you know all of the specifics of this flip, I recommend recording it with another mood board, because it’s fun! But you can also get the same results just from creating a note in your phone with all of the measurements, paint specs, and links. Below is an example of how I did this for our guest room flip.
Materials
Purchasing materials I think can be categorized under “planning” and “creating,” so I ‘m going to include it in this post. I say this because in order to purchase materials, you need to have completed planning! You can finish planning the last bits as you purchase. Now that you know what you want to do and what exactly everything is going to look like, it’s time to purchase materials! But… how much do you order?
If you’re going with box trim, you know how many boxes are going in the room and their dimensions. So you have all you need to know how much to order! To walk through the math as an example – our boxes were 27 in. X 11 in. So I knew each box would require 27(x2) + 11(x2) inches of trim. This means each box required 74 inches of wood. And for our Reno, we had 23 boxes, so 23 X 74 = 1,702 inches total. Each piece of trim we bought from Home Depot was 96 inches. So 1,702/96=17.7. So we bought 18 pieces of trim.
The same kind of math works for painting. Each gallon from Sherwin Williams claims to paint 350-400 sq ft of wall space. So it only took us exactly 1 gallon of paint to complete two coats on the upper half of the walls and the ceiling. Same logic goes for the chair rail too! We measured the length of the walls and added them up to figure out how many feet we needed and then removed the width of the two doors and the window in the room.
Some other materials to consider beyond the obvious components of your changes, are the supplies that will get you to the finish line. For this project, that meant a tarp to cover the bed, roller covers for our 18 inch paint roller frames, paint brushes for painting the trim, paint tray liners, caulk for the box seams, spackling for the nail holes, and painter’s tape for the chair rail and wall.
And the more fun things to purchase include things like bedding, decor, art, lamps, etc. I love this part because while the paint and other materials come in, I like to scroll through Facebook Marketplace, shop online deals and go to my local thrift stores to source what I need for cheap, and hopefully, sustainably!
And once you’ve ordered everything and/or have a plan for purchases, you’re done with the planning phase of this project! Congrats! I’ll be following up to this blog post with another for how I prepped and executed on this specific guest bedroom renovation, so stay tuned!
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