Kitchen DIY // Crown Molding on a Soffit

Before we even began decorating my mother-in-law’s house for the Holiday Home Tour, we tackled a bunch of quick DIY updates in her house. The front door handle was replaced, all the interior doors were painted black, the front and back doors were painted a deep purple, bisque outlets were replaced with clean white, baseboards were added where they hadn’t been before, some missing molding on the bottom of the fireplace was built and installed, we painted the kitchen and the kitchen cabinets, we added art and the staircase gallery wall, and we added crown molding to the soffit in her kitchen.

The latter was a last-minute decision when we were painting the cabinets. Nobody loves a soffit — it was an old solution that has started to look really dated, and would never appear in a high-end kitchen today. But the reality is, a TON of people still have a soffit in their kitchen and either don’t want to deal with the headache of removing it or don’t have the funds and time (or knowledge) to spend on such an in-depth kitchen update (as you usually have to replace the cabinets if you take down the soffit).

I knew my MIL hated the soffit in her kitchen, but since she had no plans to remove it in the near future, I suggested adding crown molding just on the soffit (her cabinets are all along one long wall) and painting it the same color as the upper cabinets. This would make the upper cabinets seem as if they go to the ceiling and are “built-in.” I know this is not an original idea, but it’s a solution I had never tried before, so I was really excited to see, in person, how much it can change the look of a kitchen.

Here are the cupboards before (in the middle of projects, so ignore the mess!):

Here they are after the molding went up:

Already a huge difference, even before caulking and painting, right? We had to use a scarf joint to join two 12-foot sections of molding, and simple straight cuts on the ends that met the wall.

And here they are after the molding had been caulked and painted: