How to Transform Furniture Using Scalloped Trim

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It’s one thing to watch TikToks of dedicated DIYers transforming thrift store castaways into glossy, mahogany-stained case pieces at warp speed. It’s quite another to tackle such a project yourself. Here’s a very handy in-between: Apply thin, scalloped wood trim to the edges of a piece of furniture—or even to the architecture and existing millwork in a room—and then paint the whole thing a unified new color. There are a huge variety of scalloped trim types to choose from: tiny diminutive scallops, peel-and-stick soft trim that looks like wood once painted, thicker pieces that will look like fancy millwork, and on and on. The best thing to do is plan ahead, checking measurements and deciding how best to adhere the particular trim before you purchase. (Thinner pieces may stay put with double-sided mounting squares; thicker pieces may need to be nail-gunned in place.) Here are three transformations using a range of scallops and techniques to get you inspired.

Window Trim

Creator Andrea Sanchez-Traylor used scallops to spruce up the windows in her daughter’s room, applying them right around the window box like standard trim and painting it the same color as other casework in the room. “Working with the trim was so easy!” Sanchez-Traylor recalls. Her husband cut the pieces with a saw, but she thinks that step could easily have been accomplished with simple motor shears. After painting them, the couple used a nail gun to affix the strips around the walls right up against the windows. “I loved the idea of doing something outside of the box and creative for the window trim,” she says. “I think it’s so girly and fun!”

Kitchen Cabinets

white cabinets with scallop trim — Photography by Brittany Hart.

Perhaps the lowest-fi of all is creator Brittney Hart‘s DIY for embellishing her kitchen cabinets with scallops. The trim she sourced from Amazon can be cut to fit with everyday scissors, and it is so lightweight that she was able to adhere it to the cabinets using double-sided tape. “Measure before purchasing,” she advises. “Check your measurements to see which trim works the best for your kitchen.” The scallops come in all sizes and you don’t want to order one that ends up being teensy compared to chunky curves you were imagining. Painting the scallops to match the cabinets was also essential for this DIY, and Hart flagged you’ll want to be absolutely certain that the two colors—for trim and cabinets—exactly match: “Not all whites are the same!”

IKEA Furniture

pink room with yellow bookcase — Photography by Georgina Smith.

Georgina Smith, a content creator and DIYer restoring a Victorian home in England, wanted to upgrade a simple IKEA Billy bookcase for her daughter’s room. To give it a more whimsical silhouette, she applied a self-adhesive scalloped trim sourced from Dunelm, a home goods superstore in the UK, to the front edges of the piece. Smith then primed painted the whole piece yellow (Dulux’s Pale Cream) and spruced up the back boards with wallpaper. “A lick of paint gave it a a bespoke finish, and combining the scallops with wiggle patterns created a real statement piece,” she says.