Easy DIY beginner friendly decorative wall trim using miter shears

This is easily one of my favorite DIY projects to date! It was easy, and it didn’t require the use of a saw. Which meant I wasn’t running down into my basement 100 times to cut the trim. So what did I use? Miter shears! I used these miter shears from Amazon. They allowed me to cut the PVC trim easily and accurately. I got all of my trim from Home Depot. It’s called PVC screen molding. As of the date I’m writing this its going for $3.58 per 8 foot piece. So not only is this project easy, but it is affordable as well. Easy affordable project that makes a big impact thats what we all want! So let’s get into it. 

First thing I did was measure my walls. I could tell you my measurements but they would be very different from yours since we all have different length hallways in our home. I decided based on the width of my walls that I wanted to do two boxes on each of them. I then decided to use a piece of scrap wood that I had on hand as a spacer to make things go quickly and easily.

I created this diagram as an example to show the spacing that I chose. I made the space from the outer box to the walls, ceilings, floor, and other box, the same width of 4 1/4 inches. I used a different spacer I had at home which was 2 1/4 to create the space between the outer box and the inner box. Using a spacer made the whole process go so much faster and smoother. 

So once I had the spacing figured out it was simple.

You take the width of your wall, and subtract how many spacers you have, ( for me I had 3 which totaled 12 3/4 inches) and then divide that number by how many boxes you want. So I divided by two. 

I used my 18 gauge brad nailer to install the trim and this project just cruised along!

This is what it looked like before!

time to put up the trim

These are the miter shears I used. They make cutting this trim so efficient. This is very easily a beginner DIY project!

        I used this 18g Ryobi brad nailer that I ordered off of Amazon. It’s battery operated and very easy to use. I mentioned earlier that I used a spacer and this is what I mean. For the top I used the larger spacing trim that I had and marked it. I then attached one corner of the top trim with my brad nailer and then used a level to nail the rest in. Once I knew that was level it was easy to do the sides of the box using a level as well. I didn’t use the spacing trim for most of the outer boxes because walls and ceilings can be janky and aren’t guaranteed to be level. So due to this I used a long level for most of it.  However the inside box just flew up! Since I took the time to make sure the outside. box and knew it was perfectly level and just used this spacing trim and then nailed it all in.

At one point I did run into a power outlet! Which was no problem. To solve this I just used the trim and made a box slightly bigger than the outlet. You can see in the picture how it looks better and more finished this way so the trim wasn’t just running into the outlet. 

ready to see the finished product???

I love how it turned out! I feel like it added so much to this hallway without breaking the bank. What do you think? Would you try putting up this budget friendly DIY wall trim?