Floors, walls, trim and paint in Blue Bell

Blue Bell was called Pigeontown until 1840, when it took the name of the Blue Bell Inn. Most of what stands here now came much later. Whitpain Township had about 3,000 residents in 1950 and more than 18,000 by 2000, while Unisys's headquarters and Montgomery County Community College's main campus grew up alongside the houses. The result is a township of larger homes on larger lots: 1960s split-levels, mid-1980s colonials, gated communities like Whitpain Farm with vaulted ceilings, and the homes around Blue Bell Country Club's Arnold Palmer course. The old village of Center Square, where Skippack Pike crosses DeKalb Pike, is still the crossroads of it all.

The houses are big, and the trim often isn't. Many homes here were finished with builder-grade colonial casing and a thin baseboard, which reads small against a two-story foyer or a long open first floor. That gap is where custom trim changes a room most: wainscoting up the staircase, a coffered ceiling in the family room, real crown in the dining room, or a paneled wall around the fireplace. Open plans also mean a new floor usually runs through several rooms at once, so we rack plank from three or four boxes together to keep the color even across the whole run and put transitions where nobody will notice them. In the older split-levels, the same half-flight and lower-level moisture questions apply as in any house built in the '60s.