So You Are Keeping Your Trim… Now What?

There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to what you should do with your trim because every situation is different. It will come down to factors such as your home’s floorplan, your design style, and your budget. What we can do is help you create a color story for your new kitchen that goes with your existing trim, or give you guidance on refinishing or replacing existing trim and show you how to create a transition into the rest of the home that makes sense.

Say you’ve decided to keep your trim. Where do you go from here? There are three different ways you can go about remodeling your space while keeping your existing trim:

1. Remove

Sometimes the easiest decision to make about trim is just to remove it entirely! Getting rid of trim entirely eliminates the problem of making it cohesive with other rooms. This is an easy and affordable solution if you are remodeling your space because after removal of the trim, all you need to do is touch up the paint on the walls. Great if you already plan to change wall colors!

This is especially useful in contemporary designs as the absence of trim helps create a sleek and minimalist look.

Photos by Sven Brandsma

2. Re-finish/re-paint

By re-painting or re-staining your existing trim, you get to keep your trim’s style consistent with the rest of the home but give it a fresh new look that better complements your new kitchen design.

We can help you decide where the newly painted/stained trim will stop and start so that your rooms don’t look disjointed or choppy.

One thing we would not recommend is using multiple trim colors in the various spaces in an open concept situation. For example, we wouldn’t want to paint the kitchen trim white and leave the dining room wood if there’s a lack of division between the rooms. Even a wide doorway or an opening between the rooms may not be enough to create a natural break. Connected spaces simply ought to match. In other words, if your kitchen is closed off from the adjacent rooms, you can probably get away with re-staining your kitchen trim, but if your kitchen is part of an open concept design, we would recommend keeping the same trim throughout as there won’t be a clear stopping and starting point for the newly stained trim.

Another option to consider is using trim as an accent in one or two rooms. Select one trim color to be the main color throughout your home and pick another (painted or wood) to be the accent. Whether you choose wood or white for the main color is entirely up to you, but in order to maintain some uniformity we’d highly recommend selecting one style/color for the majority of your home.

If you have a separate room that is clearly divided from adjoining rooms you could start the transition on the trim around the opening that leads into the “accent” room. This is a great way to change up your trim but avoid that “waterfall effect” with other rooms.

A doorway creates a natural divide between this kitchen and pantry allowing for an easy transition from the warm wood to Silver Mist trim. Project: English Pantry

It’s important to keep in mind that re-staining existing trim is costly, and most contractors will advise against it as the cost of re-staining trim is often more than replacing it with new. This is because your contractor would need to remove that trim from the wall, sand it, stain it, and then reinstall it. Extra steps tend to cost more money. Repainting your trim could be a more affordable option, because with proper taping and floor and wall protection, you can sand and repaint your trim without having to remove and reinstall it.

Note that you CAN paint over stained trim! But you must sand down the polyurethane (shiny topcoat) prior to painting, otherwise your paint won’t adhere properly.

3. Work your trim into the new design

If you are adamant about keeping your trim consistent throughout your home, your designer can work it into your kitchen’s new design. Since kitchen remodels usually don’t affect the whole home, keeping some existing features such as the trim or flooring can help create consistency between the existing and the renovated parts of the home.

Here are two great examples of recent projects that worked existing trim into a new design:

Our CMKBD Studio M Kitchen & Bath designer and an interior designer worked together to bring this 70’s style home into the 21^st century. A challenge in this project was to design the new space so that it would blend well with the original style of the home. The updated design needed to work with the existing space’s wood floors and honey Oak trim. To achieve this the designers selected Wynnbrooke cabinetry in Sherwin-Williams’ Ellie Gray painted finish for the wall cabinets, White Oak base cabinets in Coastal finish, and warm brass cabinet hardware and lighting.

In this kitchen remodel, the existing trim was to remain as is throughout the rest of the home. The designers opted to leave it and re-stain the wood floors to coordinate and freshen up the feel of the wood. Throughout the selection process, the aim was to pull a design that felt fresh and up-to-date while also coordinating with the existing features of the home, which dictated a warmer color palette with the cabinetry stain and paint. 

The White Oak base cabinets complement the warmth of the honey Oak trim which help it blend into the new design.