Anyway, I do have enough to make a throw out if it, which is a good thing because I don’t actually like it on the bench in the bedroom foyer.

I don’t really know what it is about it that I don’t like. Too dark? Too busy? Too green? I can’t put my finger on it. And I certainly don’t like it with the tea towels that I bought to make one of the pillows. So I thought I could just keep the two pillows I already have, but I don’t like those with it, either. It just seems a little too blah.

Of course, I will be hanging this picture on that wall above the bench. But even at that, it still seems too blah for me.

So I’ll washing that velvet fabric and turning it into a throw that I’ll either keep by the recliner in the bedroom or in the living room. I’m always wanting a comfy throw in the winter. Or I might make some throw pillows out of it for the bedroom, although I think the pattern might be a bit too bold for the headboard fabric. I’ll have to wait and see on that.

In the meantime, I went rummaging through my fabric stash to see if I could find anything that would work. I didn’t really have anything on hand that would work for the bench, but I did find this scrap of fabric and decided to try it out just to see if I liked the overall pattern and look. The color itself is all wrong. It’s too blue to go in a teal foyer. but I do love the pattern and how the more geometric pattern looks with the colorful tea towel (i.e., future pillow cover).

And I really like how it all looks with the picture that I plan to hang on that wall above the bench.

It also comes in this green color, which might be a fun contrast to the teal grasscloth wallpaper that I’ll be putting on the upper walls in the foyer and bedroom.

If I stick with the teal and white, I think this one might be my favorite. It’s a fun pattern, and it has just enough white to keep it light and interesting without the white being too stark. At least, that’s how it looks in the picture. We’ll see what it looks like when I get the sample.

It also comes in this pretty green.

I’ve ordered samples for all of those, and now I wait. I can’t even express to you how much I hate purchasing fabrics online — making choices, waiting for samples, choosing from samples, making a purchase, waiting for the fabric to come. Oh, how I miss the days when we had actual fabric stores in town where I could go, make my purchase, and come home with the immediate gratification of that fabric in hand and ready to start on a project. I hate it so much that I very often skip ordering samples and just take my chance with ordering fabric, but as in this situation, that doesn’t always work out well for me in the end.

But I really want this area to look nice. I’ll have so few options for adding color, pattern, and fabric to the foyer (all the fabric will be in this one corner), so I don’t want to just settle on something that’s kind of meh. I want to make the most of this one opportunity to bring fabric into the foyer and make it as cute, colorful, and vibrant as possible.

With that said, here’s the progress. I have all of the picture frame molding and the crown molding installed in the foyer. I didn’t remove any of the crown molding that was already there, even on this area where the crown molding stopped short of the corner where it had once wrapped around the built-in cabinet that was here. Once it’s all sanded smooth and painted, that joint won’t be noticeable.

I’m really pleased with how this picture frame molding turned out, and I’m very glad I decided to go with one rectangle on each wall regardless of how wide the wall is.

I think if I had tried to break up these wider areas into smaller rectangles, it would have looked too busy. I’m aiming for colorful but calm, not busy.

And, of course, it always has to go through this stage where it looks like the molding has chicken pox with all of the nail holes filled with wood filler.

A lot of people use caulk for the nail holes, and that’s a perfectly fine option. It’s also much faster and easier. The reason I do wood filler instead is because I find that caulk shrinks a little bit as it dries and leaves slightly detectable divots where each nail is. I like that I have more control over wood filler because, while it shrinks also, I can build it up a bit to account for the shrinkage and then sand it perfectly smooth.

I could kick myself for not taking a picture of it before trying to repair it, but you can see here that I started off trying to fill it with wood filler. It was a mess.

The other problem I had was with the chair rail on the right of the doorway into the walk-in closet. Again, I forgot to take a picture of the before, so I tried to recreate what I was working with using these scraps. The reason it didn’t come together is because that door jamb is obviously not square, so my pieces that were cut at perfect 45-degree angles didn’t meet. And this one was bad, but I was still confident that I could disguise it somehow. It looked something like this…

So as I was trying to fix the crown molding with wood filler, I thought to myself, “I just wish I had something that was less wet and more moldable.” And then it dawned on me. I DO! I just made a chandelier out of a product just like that! Air dry clay fit the bill! I wasn’t sure that it would work, but I decided to give it a try. I pushed it into the crack and then molding it as much as I could with wet fingers, but I wasn’t trying to make it look perfect at this point because air dry clay sands beautifully. Here’s what it looked like when I left it to dry overnight.

Here’s another look. You can see that it’s definitely not perfect. Just like I do with wood filler, I wanted to build it up a bit to allow for shrinkage as it dried.

And then this morning, I sanded the dried air dry clay. Just look at this!

Y’all!!! I can’t even believe how good that turned out!! Air dry clay is my new secret weapon for near-perfect trim. Oh, I so wish I had taken a picture of this before I filled it in. You would be even more amazed. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that the gap on the trim at the very furthest point from the wall was maybe as big as 1/4-inch, but certainly no smaller than 3/16-inch.

So I dug out the wood filler that I had used to try to repair the crown molding, and I replaced it with air dry clay as well. This one was much deeper than the one on the chair rail, so as I started sanding it this morning, I realized that it’s not completely dry yet. It’ll need another day before I can sand it perfectly smooth, so it’s still looking a bit rough. But once it’s completely dry and sanded smooth, you’ll never know that there was a big 5-inch-long, 1/2-inch deep chunk of trim ripped off of this crown molding.