Kitchen Crown Molding: Calculating How Many Pieces to Order

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Taking Your Measurements

Below you will find a diagram showing the floor plan of my kitchen. You can just sketch your floorplan out on a sheet of paper and take your measurements.

When taking your measurements you want to be accurate to the nearest inch for the length of your walls. You also want to take into consideration whether the wall ends with an inside corner or an outside corner. If it ends with an inside corner, you can simply record the length of the wall. If it ends with an outside corner corner (a corner where the angle is over 180 degrees) then you need to add the width of the molding to the measurement. In the diagram below I marked the inside corners with an "I" and the outside corners with an "O". Moldings that have an inside corner at one end and an outside corner at the other just need 1 width added. If there is an outside corner on both ends you need to add 2 times the width. The AB108 molding has a 4" width so that is what I plugged in for the W in the diagram below.

Calculating the Pieces Needed for the Kitchen Crown Molding

It is best to start with longest walls of the room and work your way to the shortest walls when doing your calculation. The AB108 crown molding that I was installing was 94.5" long and I rounded that down to 94" for simplicity in calculations:

Red Piece - Used full piece on the 179" kitchen wall. That wall had 85" (179"-94") that still needed molding. No scrap left of red piece.

Orange Piece - Used full piece on the 152" kitchen wall. That wall had 58" (152"-94") that still needed molding. No scrap left of orange piece.

Yellow Piece - Completed the bottom kitchen wall which needed 85" more. Yellow Scrap Piece: 9" (94"-85").

Green Piece - Used 89" for wall with 1 inside and 1 outside corner. 5" Scrap Remainaing.

Light Blue Piece - Completed the side kitchen wall that needed 58" more. Light Blue Scrap Piece: 36" (94"-58").

Dark Blue Piece - Used 57" for top wall. Dark Blue Scrap: 37" (94"-57")

Purple Piece - Used 55" for top wall. Purple Scrap: 39" (94"-55")

Pink Piece - Used 51" for top wall. Pink Scrap: 43" (94"-51")

Dark Blue Scrap Piece - Used 36" for lower wall.

Light Blue Scrap Piece - Used 24" on one wall and 10" on another wall.

Dark Purple Scrap Piece - Used 15" and 14" on the lower left wall.

Pink Scrap Piece - Used to create 4 Corner pieces and 2 Returns (not shown in diagram). Each corner needs about 6" of material and each return needs about 4" of material.

So after all the room is accounted for I used a total of 8 pieces and I had very little scraps left. If you are an inexperienced installer you might want to add an extra piece of material to your order for the "opps" factor.

** Please note that I was installing a plain molding in my kitchen. If I had chosen an ornate crown molding I would need to order extra molding to account for matching up the patterns at the corners.

Read more about this project at Crown Molding Installation: A Step by Step Guide.
Browse through our Crown Molding.
Learn more about How to Install Crown Molding.

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