Perhaps I should elaborate on my post of yesterday.Executive summary: Satan himself created crown molding. Wives love the looks of it and desire it in their rooms - and then husbands go apoplectic installing it. There can be no other explanation. There ought to be a federal law requiring "Made in Hell" be stamped onto the back of every crown molding board.
Part of the problem with installing crown molding is that I can think of three different ways of doing it (coping, compound miter cuts, and cutting at a straight 45 degrees upside down and against the stop), and everybody seems to have his own favorite method. So right away there's an element of political advocacy to it.
Based on observations of the professional we once had come in to do some rooms, I decided to use the simple, non-compound, upside-down-and-against-the-stop method, measuring two or three times and as carefully as I could. (For one wall I was at a 32nd of an inch degree of accuracy.) My pard Chris, however, who came to help, is an advocate of the coping method.
I cut the first piece for the longest wall and realized that I made the corner cuts wrong. There went the usefulness of that piece. Oh, well, we can use it on a less lengthy wall, right?
We got another piece up on the longest wall and cut another for the connecting wall. However, we quickly discovered that it didn't match at the corner. What the heck? How can this be? So there's two pieces out of my four eighteen-foot pieces cut and apparently more or less unusable. Chris attempted a coped angle which didn't really work out. (I couldn't cut a coped angle, either.)
Chris had the good idea to cut a small corner template and we tried matching this with the long piece we had installed - and discovered that the reason why the corners weren't working out was because we had installed the first piece on the wrong place on the wall. So we ripped that one off the wall and reseated it, making twice as many holes in the molding and wall. But the corners made a somewhat better match.
Somewhat. Still unsatisfactory. It's clear that there's still something wrong so, last night at a party I talked to a friend who installs corner molding for a living who agreed to drop by tomorrow to tell me where it is I'm going wrong. Unless I'm greatly mistaken he's about to get the contract awarded to him.
I can do a lot of things - electrical work, plumbing, car repair, most mechanical repairs - but carpentry has never been one of them. It is very hit and miss with me. No matter how often I measure I nearly always screw up my cuts somehow. Carpentry, for me, is a process of taking large usable pieces of wood set aside for a project and turning them into progressively smaller and smaller useless pieces of wood - which is what's happening now with the crown molding.
I remember that back in the junior high wood shop class we had an assignment to build a box. My stock started out the same size as everyone else, but at the end my box was the smallest one in the class. I clearly recall the teaching picking mine up and staring at it and me quizzically.
Oh, well. In compensation did some household molding repairs yesterday that were fully successful and look great. I even managed a proper return on one piece. The difference, of course, is that this molding goes flat against surfaces, not at a weird angle at the intersection of three planes like crown molding. Edge molding, you see, was invented in heaven. Crown molding in hell.
Hey, it's the last day of the year!
Let's review: Yesterday it occurred to me that in 2008 four bad women passed on. (Okay, three bad women and a Peruvian Inca Goddess.)
1. Yma Sumac, the aforesaid Inca Goddess with a celebrated five octave singing range. Her lower register was a deep growl and her upper register was a songbird's trill.
2. Bettie Page, who, to be fair, was only bad prior to 1960 when she became an ardant Christian and gave up nude fetishist modelling.
3. Eartha Kitt, who cooed the best-ever version of the song "Santa Baby." She was always an odd, distinctly off-beat female celebrity. While Lee Meriwether was my favorite Catwoman in the 1966 series, having Kitt (Kitt - Cat) in the role was inspired casting.
4. Ann Savage, noted yesterday. In "Detour," the Hellion from Hell. (Maybe she designed crown molding.)
We shall see what 2009 brings...
We're going to a New Year's Eve party held by some empty-nester friends tonight. In the words of Irving Berlin (as sung by Bing Crosby in "Holiday Inn"):
Let's watch the old year die/With a fond good-bye/And our hopes as high/As a kite/How can our love go wrong/if we start the new year right?
