Why does new trim look wrong in my bungalow?

Almost always because it is a modern colonial profile — narrower, moulded, and mitred at the corners — going into a house where the original trim is wide, flat and square with butted corners and a head cap. The difference reads immediately even to people who cannot name it. Matching the original section rather than buying stock is what fixes it.

Can you replace a missing plate rail?

Yes, and in these houses there is usually a pattern to work from. Plate and picture rails ran through most Craftsman interiors, so a rail surviving in one room gives us the height, the section and the bracket detail for reinstating it in another. Where nothing survives we work from the ghost line on the wall, which is generally still visible under the paint.

Port Huron, St Clair County, MI

Crown & Trim in Port Huron, MI

Name: Maceri Woodworking
Address: 33628 Bayview Dr, Chesterfield, MI, 48047, US
Telephone: (586) 823-2887
Price range: $$

Craftsman trim is the opposite of Victorian trim, and Port Huron has a great deal of both. In a bungalow the casings are wide, flat and square-edged with a simple head cap and no mitres — the corners butt. Getting that detail right is what makes replacement work invisible.

The most common damage in these houses is at the bottom of casings and baseboards from water and radiators, and around doors that have been rehung. Because Craftsman profiles are simple sections rather than complex mouldings, matching them is very achievable — we mill flat stock to the exact width and thickness and reproduce the head cap and backband, and a spliced repair disappears completely. What does not work is substituting a modern colonial casing, which is narrower, moulded and mitred at the corners; it is instantly wrong in a room where everything else is square. The other big piece of trim work here is the plate rail and picture rail, which Craftsman houses used throughout and which is frequently missing from one room while surviving in another — that surviving run is the pattern. In the nineteenth-century houses on Military Street and around it we do the other kind of work entirely: reproducing deep moulded Victorian profiles from a sample, splicing repairs into original lengths, and reinstating detail lost to earlier remodelling.

We take a sample of your original, mill to match at our Chesterfield shop, and show you the milled piece against the existing before running the job. Repairs get quoted as repairs.

Port Huron is about thirty miles from our Chesterfield shop, at the north end of the river run we work every week.

Crown & Trim questions from Port Huron homeowners

Why does new trim look wrong in my bungalow?: Almost always because it is a modern colonial profile — narrower, moulded, and mitred at the corners — going into a house where the original trim is wide, flat and square with butted corners and a head cap. The difference reads immediately even to people who cannot name it. Matching the original section rather than buying stock is what fixes it.
Can you replace a missing plate rail?: Yes, and in these houses there is usually a pattern to work from. Plate and picture rails ran through most Craftsman interiors, so a rail surviving in one room gives us the height, the section and the bracket detail for reinstating it in another. Where nothing survives we work from the ghost line on the wall, which is generally still visible under the paint.