I walked in and I knew within two minutes that this was a quality-built house. It was a modest split-level—-no vaulted ceilings, no spectacular centerpiece. In fact there was nothing “outstanding.” Even the trim was simple and unobtrusive, but a close look around the windows showed precise mitered angles and no sign of nails. It was the trim around the bottom of the wall that said the most: tight corners and carefully constructed returns. Very few people bother to do that today.
Trim and moldings were once the most obvious part of both furniture and house interior finishing. There were simple mechanical reasons why most of it has disappeared today. The beauty and creativity of molding designs was an outgrowth of the need to hide construction joints as well as junctions between different materials. Modern materials have changed all that. With drywall returns on windows and tapered corners, many modern houses now use trim only to hide the door frames and the intersection between walls and floors. Read More
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