Part 1 Adding Mouldings to Your Ceiling (and What To Do When It Goes Wrong)

My pops, a plasterer by trade, was repelled when I said I was going to do this. Ok, maybe repelled is too strong of a word, but he was not happy. How did I, his beloved daughter, risk the alienation of my papa? I put up a polysterene coving.

We need to go back to when we first moved into the house. Despite our French home being ancient, built in the pre 1850s, there are no real period features. But I wanted our village house to have something of a classic, Edwardian look about it. That meant mouldings. In the centre of the room was a medallion and I’d decided I wanted to highlight this by having a coloured ceiling. A closer inspection of the ceiling when I started work showed that it wasn’t an original feature, but a modern, polystyrene addition.

In addition to the medallion I wanted coving, and when I was searching on line I found that what was readily available was the polystyrene kind. A further search revealed that even the more expensive resin type coving was prohibitive, let alone plaster.

Added to that I was in the house on my own and would need to put it up myself. So I ran the risk of buying some.

It’s light weight and you can therefore put it up singlehandedly as a woman. However I did run into some difficulties.

Firstly it said how it would be easy to cut an angle. Well I completely mucked that up and it was a bit of a bodge job looking like this…

Unfortunately I seemed to have lost the original photos, but on some of the corners there where huge gaps between the two side. I managed to salvage them by getting some extra pieces of coving and pushing them into gaps and gluing them in place prior to caulking, caulking, caulking. Caulk was my friend, but I was unhappy with the results for quite some time. Even where there where two straight sides in a run, they looked amateurish. Not happy. More on that in a bit.

Just to note at this moment though – I’ve since bought one of these to cut angles. They’re definitely worth it.

The next difficulty I ran into was that I didn’t make sure I smoothed out the glue as I applied it. I don’t know why I didn’t do something so basic. I could literally kick myself now. However I just stuck it up there and thought I’d smooth it out later with sandpaper – that doesn’t work. Whether it’s caulk or glue smooth it out as much as possible with your finger for a professional finish.

Can I just add that with the ceiling medallion in the hallway I painted that prior to putting it up and I had a much better finish. The one in the dining room was difficult to paint in situ. Obvious I know, but worth mentioning. If I was ever wanting to highlight a relief in different colours I’d definitely paint first and then touch up in situ.

Having grown so fed up of looking at shabby joins I finally ordered these wood decals from here. Those of you who have followed my mouldings series from the hallway will no I’m a appliqué queen – admittedly a small kingdom – and so I simply glued these to the coving to cover any unsightly gaps. They don’t touch all the way, but they still work.

I used clear no more nails type glue on the back of the wood decal and pushed it against the coving where I wanted it to go, holding it there for two or three minutes. This isn’t a complicated fix, you just have to be a little bit patient.

Stay in the room afterwards. If they fall off add more glue, then put them back. This happened to me a couple of times, but eventually I won the battle.

Afterwards I painted with white chalk paint to give it a plaster like texture. This had the additional benefit of securing the appliqué further.

Here’s the room before….