I'm in the middle of yet another home renovation project, this to convert what was a kitchen into what will be a dining room. Ours is an older home (1917) and as I've worked my way from room to room I've added lots of crown moulding. This room is no exception.

Actually, it's more than no exception. In my little world of home renovations, this is to installing crown moulding what rebuilding the engine is to minor auto repair.

In an effort to maintain ceiling height while working around two newly-installed 8" I-beams, I've coffered the ceiling. That is, divided it up into twelve sections each separated by wooden dividers that are suspiciously close in size to an 8" I-beam. So, we've got all these wooden boxes crisscrossing the ceiling.

On the inside of all these boxes is crown moulding. Lots of crown moulding. If you've never done crown you'll find it's both easier and harder than you think it should be. Harder because you can't simply put it in a miter saw, cut a 45-degree angle and have the two pieces meet up right. There are a variety of reasons for this but in my case start with the fact that nothing in my house is square, including these ceiling "squares."

So, the proper way to install crown is to cope it. Coping is using a coping saw (hence the name) to cut a shape out of the end of one piece of crown which will exactly match up to the contours of the face of another piece when they are installed together. It sounds impossible at first but it's not quite that bad.

Almost, but not quite.

What you need to do is, with a miter saw, make a 45-degree cut on the end of the soon-to-be-coped trim. If you cut it the right way (the first test), the resulting edge is what you need to cope along. There are some fussy issues around undercutting it so things fit together and whatnot but with just a little practice it turns out not to be so hard as it seems like it would be.

What's hard, it turns out, is getting it installed.

I've put complex crown moulding in, I believe, eight rooms in this house so far. Four of those rooms have multiple-piece crowns where you put two or three different types of moulding together to make something fancier (or at least tougher to do). I've got a lot of crown and coping experience.

But room after room, project after project, I've found the same thing: No matter how thoroughly and carefully I cope the crown, when it finally comes to putting it up in place, things don't fit right. I fiddle and fuss and, well, let's just say thank god for caulk.

Until now, that is.

In the course of doing the coffered ceiling in the soon-to-be-dining room I had a Brilliant Flash of the Obvious. It was the benefit, I suppose, of doing what is essentially a dozen small rooms in close succession rather than one big one a year.

In the first couple of coffers I did what I've always done: Cut everything as carefully as possible, nail the first piece into place, then start fitting the others to it. And, like most of my prior experiences, I was back to the old problem of nothing really fitting right. Close, but not right. Not, really, even close enough to pretend it was right.

It was looking like a miserable project (which would need a lot of caulk).

What I couldn't figure was why the damned coping fit so nicely when I was in the basement workroom and so pathetically when I put it into place on the ceiling. And then it hit me. The problem with my coping--hell, the problem with the whole thing--wasn't my coping. The coping was fine. Better than fine, even. The problem was the very first piece of crown, which had no coping at all, was in at the wrong angle.

Duh.

Crown goes in at roughly a 45-degree angle across the corner where a wall and the ceiling meet. The back of the moulding has flat spots where it touches both the wall and the ceiling. In this project and in, I'm very sorry to say, all my others, I always started by "eyeballing" the first piece of crown into place, doing my best to get it at just the right angle to the wall, then nailing it because, after all, it was too big to hold up more than one piece at a time. The problem is, it wasn't right.

In this project, where my chunks of crown were only a few feet long, the physics of working by myself changed. I could hold up two pieces at a time. And, by making the trivial change of holding the second piece up along with the first, and of fitting the two of them together before attaching the first to the wall I went from schlep to near-perfection in one swell foop.

Honestly, the change in the quality of the fit was so extreme it is hard to describe here. Stunning is close to the right word. It made A Big Difference. And all so easy. So easy.

Granted, in a full-size room, where the pieces of crown may be 16-, 18- or more feet long, it would be a lot harder to hold two pieces up in place at once, but let me tell you, it's worth it. I, for one, will be shopping for an assistant the next time I tackle a crown moulding project.

If you do any of your own home renovations, take my advice and do the same. It'll save you an awful lot of caulk.

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