Changing Our Old Window Trim

It's funny how sometimes you end up working on something unexpected. My wife and I had been going back and forth between blinds in our little breakfast area just outside our kitchen when the last set of blinds was particularly difficult to take down. After that, we decided that this last set of blinds would be it and to not have to worry about taking down blinds again, my wife was going to paint the window frame white. Our plan was to stop there, but after painting the window frame, we decided to change the trim as well.

As you can see in the picture above, the extra white frame looked bad with the old wooden trim. We thought about just painting everything white, but we have bigger plans for our window trim in the living room and wanted everything to match.

We a few pieces bought 21/32-in X 2-1/2-in X 8 ft primed MDF from Home Depot. We had to get it in 8 foot pieces because that's the longest we could fit in our car, but it did lead to some waste. Because the long sides of all of the windows is about 5 feet, we needed to buy 8 pieces or 64 feet when we really only needed about 50 feet. At least MDF is cheap and we have a few other projects lined up.

The first thing that we had to do was to remove the old window trim. To do this, I used a chisel and a hamer to get underneath the trim. Once I had pulled it away enough, I used a prybar to carefully pull the trim off.

The next step was too cut the wood. I used a miter saw for all of my cuts. All of the ends were cut at 45 degrees so they would fit nicely together. A lesson that I learned early on was to not try to cut all of the wood at once and then put them up because you won't be able to compensate for any mistakes. Also, measure and cut using the innermost side of the trim.

You'll need a nail gun to do this with any precision. I don't own one yet so I ordered a cordless nail gun from Home Depot for about $30 for 4 hours.

 

Start by cutting and nailing the top trim piece. Then measure, cut, and nail the side pieces. Finally do the same with the bottom piece. I find with that order, you'll be able to put up your trim without wasting any wood.

After putting everything up. We used spackle to fill in the nail holes and caulked all of the creases. Then after a quick paint job, we were done and ready to put up the shades.

To complete the project, we used cordless top-down bottom-up cellular shades from Home Depot.

We're very happy with the final look.