Crown moldings add that little touch of glamour to a room, and present a very professional finish that compliments sophisticated décor.  As well as looking beautiful crown moldings are also a practical way to finish a room and disguise uneven joins between the ceiling and the wall and so are an important tool for professionals that are renovating older builders which may have slightly crooked ceiling joins.

It can take some practice to get proficient at installing crown molding, and many amateurs can waste a lot of materials at the cutting stage, trying to get the joins to fit, which is actually quite tricky if you have not been shown how to do it properly by an experienced crown moldings installer.

Angles
The secret to joining crown molding sections perfectly is to look at the angles more closely, as you will see that a standard molding join will just not work for this material.  The inside and outside corners of the room will be at 90 degree angles and you will need to cut the crown molding so that all the angles add up to this, and the trick is to join the two main pieces of trim with a third piece, which is cut into a perfect triangle.

This will create a smooth join on outside corners, and for inside corners you can add a small triangle shaped piece of wood to fill the corresponding gap created by the crown molding trim as is cuts across the corner at the point the two walls meet.  A power miter box saw will make this cutting task nice and easy. If you are not sure what to do a good idea is to watch an experienced crown molding fitter make the cuts, and then keep any off cuts that are left handy so that you can refer back to them when you are going it alone.

Test Pieces
To save wasting any expensive crown molding trim, use some similar size pieces of wood or standard trim and go around the room and make some test cuts, or better still if you are going to be doing this task a lot then have some pre-cut examples of different joins ready in your tool box, and match them up to corners so you will know exactly what you need before you start cutting for real.  This will significantly reduce the amount of time you will have to spend on installing crown molding as well as saving on wastage.