Prices, Promotions, styles, and availability may vary. Our local stores do not honor online pricing. Prices and availability of products and services are subject to change without notice. Errors will be corrected where discovered, and Lowe's reserves the right to revoke any stated offer and to correct any errors, inaccuracies or omissions including after an order has been submitted.

Designing With Millwork

Brian Gregory

By Brian Gregory
Updated January 20, 2020

There’s no need to hire a contractor or blow your budget to make over a room. Use predesigned millwork to get the look you want.

A modern bedroom with an accent wall covered in prefinished barn wood millwork planks.

What Is Millwork?

A before-and-after shot of a living room with an accent wall and a staircase covered in rustic millwork planks, complete with a barn-style sliding door.

Millwork refers to a variety of preshaped or prefinished wooden building materials, such as mouldings or predesigned wooden boards. These materials add architectural interest and are excellent additions to any room, as they’re relatively inexpensive, can be easily mounted and can totally transform a bland space.

Good to Know

Millwork can be installed in a variety of ways, but before you grab a ladder, consider how permanent you want your addition to be. Construction adhesive will give you a firmer hold, but it’s also more challenging to remove and it may strip wall coatings — plus, some adhesives require you to clean the mounting surface first. To avoid completely refinishing the surface when it’s time to redecorate, consider using finishing nails.

Use a Lot or a Little

A split-screen image of a modern bedroom: one with an entire accent wall covered in prefinished barn wood millwork, the other with hanging dimensional wall art created out of millwork planks.

Cover an entire accent wall in shiplap, create a custom headboard for a bed out of planks or simply add a few touches here and there—millwork can add depth, texture and a tactile charm to any room. For a fun weekend project, we crafted this gallery-worthy dimensional wall art out of pre-stained barn wood (#772868, #772866) and hung it from a sliding door track (#676804) with picture wire (#348184, #656942, #491403).

Learn How to Install Shiplap

Create an Accent Wall with Shiplap

Shop Prefinished Wall Planks

Moulding Magic

A dining room with green walls and a variety of wainscoting created with prefinished white moulding.

Whether you spell it "moulding" or "molding," it’s quite possibly the most versatile material ever. Take a look at this layered wainscoting we created using different sizes and shapes of prefinished white moulding.

Install Decorative Moulding

Moulding Buying Guide

Moulding Glossary

 

Mixing Millwork

The corner of an accent wall covered in prefinished rustic planks and tied together with white crown and baseboard moulding.

There’s no rule that says you have to use only one type of millwork for a single project. We created contrast by pairing rustic boards with this sleek white crown moulding.

Shop Moulding & Millwork

Millwork Hack #1: Barn-Style Sliding Door

A sliding barn-style sliding door created out of prefinished rustic millwork.

The farmhouse look is in, and a barn-style sliding door is the ultimate entryway for any room with a rustic motif. We created our own using prefinished weathered planks (#774023, #774024) and a sliding barn door hardware kit (#676804), proving you can even use millwork as a building material. Learn to build a Barn-Style Sliding Door.

Shop Sliding Barn Doors

Shop Sliding Barn Door Hardware

Millwork Hack #2: Shoe Rack

A creative shoe rack created out of two sizes of prefinished white moulding.

It turns out moulding’s not just for outlining ceilings, floors and doorways. With a bit of creativity and minimal woodworking skills, you can even use it to craft fun and practical mini-projects, like this shoe rack fashioned out of two different sizes of crown moulding. Let your imagination guide you!