Beautiful DIY Corner Column!

Hey Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Recently Dirt Farmer Maggie and I took on the project of doing some crown molding and so forth in our master bedroom suite but we had this outside corner that was just way too plain so we built this applied faux column. Let me walk you through just an overview of the way that we did it. Stay tuned. Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. We really enjoy the look that this applied column has brought to our living space but it's a fairly complex project. May just look like one thing but it's a lot of components that went together and to show you step by step how we built each one would take way more time that you'd want to invest. So I'm just going to give you the high points of how we did this, how we designed it and there are literally a thousand different combinations you can come up that would best fit your space. So I'm going to give you a lot of principles you can use to build one of these for your living space. Let's get started. So the first thing you've got to do is just come up with a basic concept of the design that you want for the corner. And so I turned to Pinterest. If you go to the areas that say trim, molding, inside trim, you're going to get a lot of ideas including a lot of these corner columns or applied columns like this. And the particular rendition that I ended up using was this one. That was the basic concept. Having settled on that then I need to proportion it out and figure out well this raised panel section at the bottom here, how tall is it? How tall is the midsection where you have all the fluted column area and then the head block at the top, how tall is it? Well when I applied all the math to it and proportioned it out, this is about 40 inches tall right here. This is about 45 inches right up from the top of this base raised panel block here up to here and with this crown and then the head block area up to the ceiling is about 11 inches. So now we have our basic dimensions to work with. The next thing you need to figure out is how to get different areas of it to take on visual weight. So obviously you wouldn't want something the smallest at the bottom and then everything builds on it because it would look like that it's not going to support the weight, the visual weight correctly. So to give more mass to this section here we decided to pop this out at least three inches in this section from the wall and by the time you put the cap on it it's more like four inches to give visual weight here. These are actual raised panels that have been put into styles and rails and I want you to notice something down here. This bottom style actually runs all the way through to the floor but leaves a reveal from right there to there that's roughly the same as from here to here. So you get that nice look all the way around the shadow lines of the raised panel all that here and then when you apply the matching molding and waistband from the wall around here you get that nice wrap continuity but without making it look like it was an afterthought because it wasn't. It was thought out. All right so now we have right up here to 40 inches. There are literally hundreds of different ways and if you're a purist you're probably looking at this and going boy he borrowed from all sorts of styles and that's probably true and I kind of made this up a little bit as I went. What might that look like? So one thing I did is decide to put a 45 degree chamfer all on this leading edge and match it and telegraph it to the cap here. I thought it softened it. It gave another shadow line another reflectant surface here and it makes it more durable because hard edges corners tend to get beat or nicked pretty badly so that softened the look right here and kind of rounded it. So now we're up 40 inches here. That was one whole section. I scribed this all in and got it to form to the corner. As you probably know from building outside corners like this are very rarely true 90. They kind of flare out to it and such was the case here. So we had to do a little bit of scribing and what I mean by that is shaping the top of this cap to get it to exactly match the wall so there was no gaps on the outside corners. Once this was applied glued in and settled in we went ahead and put the base around the bottom and actually the base was pre-installed in the shop and then we matched the base on the wall to it. So and but you could do that either way. So now we're to this portion. Now we need to build this section right here which is the main visual part of the column itself and we did this fluting using a three-quarter inch bullnose bit to do these with a fence that we moved over in even increments. Had to play with that a little bit to get the right balance left and right. Visual weight again that tied into other elements and that you didn't end up like you had too many of these. We found that three for this width of approximately seven inches worked very well and again looks real massive. We chose not to round this off up here because that's not where it's going to get that much weight and it would have kind of conflicted with the rounding inside of here. If we would have done anything we've done a reverse round into that but felt it was just too much. Looked too bricky-bracky if that makes sense. Wanted simpler cleaner and so that's what we did here. So now you have this column that goes all the way up and pre-installing we put a small version of the crown. So now two sections have gone in again to get this to land on the corner. We made it so that the edges that wrap around the corner over here were a little long and that way I could again scribe it by putting it there finding out where the gap is drawing a pencil line along it sanding off the high areas or planing them off until I got this to fit just beautifully and 90 degrees and not tweak either way on the corner and we glued that in. Now we're two-thirds of the way there approximately. We have the base with a raised panel. We have the fluted section with its top crown. Now came the head block. Now the head block is kind of a massive piece. I go back and forth on it. It's proportionate some of the designs I've seen but once we've got it in here I really like it. It's kind of up it elevates. We use rosette blocks on it right here. This is just again a version of this but bigger size to reveal just about the size you need right here and then a waistband put around it that matches everything that you see on the ceiling with the crown molding and we've actually faked it a little bit. As you can see that molding that second one down is actually just applied and the section above it is painted in. It's actually the same as the wall but it gives that apparent height of a very large crown molding without all the expense. You're actually using a smaller crown a space on the wall and then a band molding. It gives that really nice appearance and then that band molding for continuity interest and tie-in we just pulled it in all the way around the head block so you get a butt in a 90 degree out a 90 degree turn another 90 degree turn another 90 degree turn and then it takes off down the wall ties it all together and then everything was primed painted brushed in it's taken multiple strokes some of this is made out of hardwood some is made out of MDF but the whole thing is just turned out beautifully. So that's kind of a walkthrough of how we put it together. If you're interested in particular question that you've got on this feel free to write me in the comment section below. We always monitor that and we're glad to hear what you have to say or any insights that you have to offer about how to do something like this. If you found this video to be helpful won't you like it and better yet please subscribe to our channel and when you do ring the bell and you'll be informed approximately every Friday of our next episode of things around the house around the shop that just help you to just do it yourself. Until the next time this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com