Joanna Gaines Has A Clever Trick For Adding Trim Without Breaking Your Budget

If you're itching to make a change in your home but don't have the time or money to invest in a full renovation, there are a few options to choose from. You can give your walls a coat of one of 2026's trending paint colors, midnight teal, or swap out some of your furniture for newer options. If neither of those appeals to you, or you want to add a little something extra after doing them, then Joanna Gaines has a great suggestion. You can class up your home by using applied molding to add dimension to your walls. Gaines features this option as part of one of her mini-renovations, adding applied molding to the walls as a way of making the room more dynamic and cohesive.

If the only kind of wall molding you've heard about is the unpleasant growing kind, you'll be delighted to know that the applied variety is totally different. Molding in this context refers to the decorative raised wooden strips on a wall or door. You can add trim to the tops of your walls, baseboards to the bottoms, and even panels in the center to give your walls an added air of elegance. Applied molding is added to a wall or door after it's been built, meaning you can apply it to your room at any time! 

There are many different styles of applied molding, from simple raised strips to more ornate shapes. They can be glued to your wall in any arrangement you like, and there are even peel-and-stick options to add trim to your walls with no tools.

First, think about what sort of feeling you want for the room overall. Do you want the room to feel calm or bold? This will help guide you toward the specific molding shapes that work for you. Placement and style can combine to create a number of different effects. For example, a simple molding applied evenly throughout the room can change the ambient vibe of the space without being distracting. A thicker trim or more ornate style used sparingly, on the other hand, becomes a statement piece. Using applied molding around your door frames and windows draws people's attention toward these features, while adding picture frame molding evenly spaced around the room will create a more balanced feel.

Next, consider how the room is decorated (or how it will be decorated, if it's currently empty). If the upper half of your wall is already covered with framed pictures and you don't want to move them around, your molding should probably go on the bottom half of your wall. The opposite is also true. If your furniture hides most of the lower half of your walls from view, you may want to place your applied moulding up higher so that it's visible. If the room already has some trim, you can choose a matching or complementary style to keep everything feeling cohesive. However, you can also remove trim by gently separating it from the wall and removing any adhesives or nails. The area underneath may be damaged or marked from the trim, so be prepared to either repaint it or replace it with new trim.