i like white trim because it goes with any color of paint, natural wood does not. i like wood floors and wood furniture but not wood trim.

White trim for the windows and doors is classic. It's a clean look and like nnigrt said it doesn't limit your other choices. That said, I wouldn't paint my banister rail white. It's okay to have some things be wood.

The trend is white because the cost of material can be much lower if it is paint grade. If you have nice wood it cost a lot more and adds richness the white can not. The wood or white is nice if kept in balance but consider what you really want for a long time before painting over a nice quality wood. It is a huge job to undo painted wood.

We have a home built in 2007 that has all white trim. It was considered an upgrade, but the wood looking trim the builder offered at the time wasn't good quality. Personally I would have NEVER chosen white trim, but we bought the home a couple years ago and the trim was already there. Now that I have it, I LOVE it! It fits this home well. I still like and admire stained trim on good quality wood. At least with stained wood, you don't have to re-paint every few years!

@ Becca - I also painted my spindles - I don't have a whole staircase full, some at the bottom and some at the top. Mine used to be carpeted, but I refinished them. I have stair tread rugs on them to help keep me and the dogs from slipping. (pic. #1) These are held down by carpet tape and do not move. Some also put a runner down. As I mentioned before, I have a wood /white mix in my home, and for me it is a nice compromise. The white is bright and clean, and the wood is warm.

I also have been replacing other flooring with traditional hardwood. The main level was finished a few years ago and my flooring guy is doing part of the upstairs as I type. I am so happy to be getting it done - but the house is in total disorder:) Your plan sounds like it will add to the loveliness and value of your home.

For me, I have chosen natural or medium tone traditional wood floors. These have been in homes since at least the end of the 1800s to present, so they are more timeless. However, there are also many interesting new styles like the hand scraped look. I am unsure of how difficult those are to refinish. Traditional hardwood can be refinished many times - so it is a forever floor.

We are in the process of painting all of our baseboards, window trim, and jams white. Our house was built in the early nineties and everything was honey oak. We are staining our doors, floors and handrails dark. After doing a lot of on-line research, it seems to be what most people are doing these days. An interesting newer trend is the gray-stained wood. We'll see if that catches on.

The reason there is a "trend" to have white wood is the fact that most of this is not wood at all. They are using factory made fiberboard which is significantly cheaper. The contractors also save time and money and labor as they don't need highly skilled labor to put up painted trim. If you make a mistake you can use wood filler and paint. Staining and varnishing is more expensive than paint. The bottom line: painted wood is CHEAP, any builder will charge you significantly more for stained maple or oak than they would for painted. New homes are where people look to see what is "trendy" or in style. Remodels are the same thing... when adding new woodwork I save big money doing painted wood over matching maple, oak, or birch trim in homes.

I grew up in a 1960's ranch house in northern Indiana. It had stained wood trim. That was all I knew. Everybody had stained wood trim. I moved to Houston in 1982 and everyone had white painted trim. To me its a regional and climate thing. Homes in this area are so much fresher looking and because of the heat people tend to go with lighter looking interiors. I would never----ever have stained wood trim.

It's an interesting personal preference because I, for one, loathe, I mean really loathe the look of wood stained trim. White trim is just so sharp and classy. Wood stained trim looks like my grandma's house to me. But, every man in my life...dad, brother, husband, think it's practically a sin to paint good wood. Which I don't get because good wood or not...it literally grows on trees! Who cares if it's "good" wood? Ugly is ugly so if it was 18 karat gold trim, I'd still want to paint it white. It's just so clean and crisp and does a MUCH better job of making any wall color choice stand out. In the end, I see the color...so wood stain is really only varying shades of orange and brown. So a blue wall with orange trim is what I see. My brother, on the other hand, would nearly have a heart attack if he learned it was good wood under the white paint I'd put over it. I just don't get it. It grows on trees.

I live in MN and the trend here for new construction homes is the wide white enameled trim, not the cheap pre-made white trim. It's usually enameled on site and is more expensive than stained wood. It's a very beautiful clean look that makes the walls pop. Natural wood/stained wood trim is very dating to a home. If doing this for your personal preference and plan to stay a long time, do what you love. If you want to sell in the next few years, then you need to consider the trends. We are looking for our next home and are struggling with all the dated finishes in existing homes. We would prefer a new home over existing for this reason or we will have to do a lot of basic updates.

If you don't love white trim, but want something to update the oak trim, why not paint it a color? Depending on the other colors in your house, you could use anything from charcoal grey, to taupe to colors. If you are stumped with color, I like to look at Farrow and Ball paint colors. They have a narrowed down color palette that has some really great colors in it.

I think it really depends on the style of a house. I love dark stained wood baseboards and trim - but on the right house. Think mountain home in Breckinridge,
Aspen or Park City - with lots of stone and iron. In a regular, every-day house in the suburbs - yeah, I imagine it would look like grandma's house. So... I say think about the architecture and style of the house that you're going for - and let that dictate what you do.

Another option is an off white or cream color. It's a softer/warmer look than white. One of my friends is building a home and debating between a white/off white or a light grey trim. If you are planning to stay in your home long term, then definitely do what you like and not worry about trends.

I can't stand the current trend pushed by HGTV to paint everything white. It makes my blood boil. Paint CAN make some details look fresh... the first few times it is done. However, it doesn't hold up (ESPECIALLY if done in white) and will need to be redone over and over to look its best. Once there are many of layers of paint on something, it looks old, beat, and terrible. You then have to replace it entirely, or start with the incredibly time consuming process of stripping the paint off.

In my opinion, trim/molding is an extension of the floor. If you have hardwood floors, the trim should be wood stained to match. If you have stone or marble floors, there should be stone or marble trim. Carpet is where I consider an exception. While I have seen carpet used as trim, it's more of a cheap commercial look (it's not horrible, but not ideal). If there's a light neutral carpet and light neutral walls, stained wood trim can give a nice strip of neutral contrast- however, some carpet/wall color combinations might call for a painted color. That's up to you, I don't think there's always a right answer there. Just remember, stained wood literally matches every color- except certain certain browns that may clash with the stain color.

The thing I don't understand is why anyone would ever want to ruin a natural material with paint. Stained wood, stone, marble, granite, and similar materials are beautiful, expensive, and prestigious. If you're building something new and can't afford these quality materials, that's one thing. If you just bought an old house full of beautiful original woodwork and want to paint it all white because "it's dated and too dark", you are in the wrong. Imagine buying an expensive emerald ring, only to then think "emeralds are dated", and then coat it in white enamel. Or if you bought an original antique portrait of someone famous. Would you then say "that's dated, it needs hipster glasses painted on it"? No. You would literally be destroying something expensive, beautiful, and one of a kind with something cheap.

End the the crusade against stained wood! If you think it makes the room too dark, get better lighting instead!

My wife and I have wondered why the rush to all white and we noticed in this old house magazine last year all the white kitchens. 2 years ago we redid our kitchen and removed the old honey oak cabinets and re-purposed to my workshop and made an island from the base cabinets. We then chose a nice mahogany color cabinet with volga blue granite and did our floor in a combo of black/rust/tan staggered tile. And the original stained crown and trim look good with it.

We are finishing a foyer remodel with a nice light hickory laminate floor and tile I laid and going with a lighter paint to replace the terra cotta paint. (too many reds/browns) and I just discovered how cheap the oak baseboard and door trim is at home depot so taking the worn out pine and installing the new oak freshly stained. We love seeing the grain in wood. Even though our kitchen is somewhat dark. We get a lot of light in there from patio door and at night we have a lot of lighting including under cabinet led's. And with the off white wall paint the trim all pops nicely. I'm not bashing white I like some of the designs but it's just not for us.

Painted wood, enamel or otherwise is NOT more expensive than stained wood. If you are paying more you are being seriously ripped off. Good wood, walnut,cherry, maple etc.... Is easily 3 times the cost.

It goes in cycles. Many older houses built in the early 20th century - even with beautiful oak woodwork - were painted out white in the 40's and 50's. Then in the 70's and 80's, young couples purchased these old houses and bought heat guns (did they even sell heat guns before 1975?) so we could strip the paint off the woodwork. Natural woodwork was what everybody wanted until the pendulum swung in the other direction - now all the design sites, TV shows and model homes have mostly white painted woodwork. Even more so - it seems the vast majority of ROOMS are white, too. Last time I visited houzz.co.uk, I swear 95% of the rooms in the photo stream were WHITE! I'm sick of white.

I built my own house in 1992, and finished/stained all the woodwork myself. I've been considering how to update our look, but I'm not breaking out any paint for the woodwork. I figure in another 5-8 years, it will be back in style.

i wanted a two toned paint look in my front room but refused to paint real wood white. So I added oak chair rail. I think it complimented all of the other wood nicely. It might look a little out dated for some but I just can't paint wood. Here's a pic

I can't keep up with all of the trends! LOL We are slowly painting ours as we redo rooms. Simply because we are tired of the stained wood. Maybe we will get tired of the white someday also- we had the stained for almost 20 years. I think it is more what you prefer.

If you have nice quality wood trim, keep it. Paint your walls a pretty shade of white and work in color with decorative elements (eg. an oriental rug from 10,000 Villages). The white woodwork's not for you. It's for the less fortunate among us.

Like me. I bought a 100+ year old home as my first house, and along with suffering an extremely inhospitable environment and some subdivision retrofits, it was never very good quality construction. Throughout the crown mouldings are MDF. The downstairs floors are wood, but a soft, narrow maple that in the US is normally reserved for the private upstairs rooms in this house vintage. Upstairs, the worn pine floors are on their last legs, sagging atop decayed joists, and bursting with splinters. Throughout, the wide woodwork baseboard trim is not secured to the underlying plaster, and on the main floor, along with the door and window framing, that woodwork is a mishmosh of age-darkened oak and cheap pine that would be very expensive, toxic, and time-consuming to strip down to make it attractive.

What to do in this case? In the affluent parts of the world, or if you have building skills, people would dust off their hands, and move or tear down. But that's not an option here: the housing stock in this part of the world is all equally poor up to the million dollar home range. I have rudimentary construction skills. After starting out adamantly against painting wood trim, I have come to terms with the poor quality of this house, and have been considering options as we progressively renovate. Painting trim white seems to exceed a new home construction fad, and rather seems to be rooted in integrity European traditions. However: In this vintage home, the upstairs wood trim is either originally or long painted white, and I hear a commentator's point above about how painting trim white is asking for a legacy of increasingly-cruddy-looking trim.

The other two options I've been considering are staining the woodwork a glossy custom black (with just a hint of a dark brown undertone), as I've seen in a Brooklyn reno project, or, if I run into a contractor who doesn't mind hazarding leukemia, stripping the woodwork and standardizing it with a watery IKEA white stain, as I've seen in a San Francisco reno project, both featured on Houzz.

White trim/molding is timeless and classic. It has been around for centuries and will never go out of style. It also also much more versatility for paint colors.

I STRONGLY disagree that white trim/molding is more versatile when it comes to coordinating paint colors. Wood goes with anything, because its emphasis is on its grain/texture, rather than its actual color. It's able to stand alone as its own feature. The stain is more of an afterthought, assuming it's not some kind of hideous bright orange or something.

Painted white trim, on the other hand, has no depth, texture, or interest. It's nothing more than an additional color that you have to work into your room's color palette. If there is white elsewhere in your room, great; it's easy and it works. However, bright or deep wall colors tend to look clownish with white trim, unless the room is overwhelming that one color and the white is your primary highlight.

If you watch HGTV, there's a reason that they paint every wall gray, and insist on painting all cabinetry white. They need to take away all the competing colors, because white does not coordinate well with most colors (or multiple colors). It's all white, gray, neutral floors, and then a pop of a single bright color.

White is quite limiting.

As Realestate agent the "trend" is white or similar "soft colors". There are several reasons for this of course and some have already been mentioned such as the cost of products being used in "modern" homes are often of lower quality than what was used before the turn of the century.

Of course if everything IN the house was white, the net effect would be quite mundane. Consequently the "trend" is to white wash darn near every except add-ons such as COUNTERTOPS, CABINETS, FLOORING and furniture, etc

This effect seems to "work" very well bc WHITE is very easy to coordinate with anything else "added" to a home. Finally bc of it's visual/perceptual characteristics WHITE or soft colors tend to enhance the size of any living space.

Nonetheless, it's your home and like many who appreciate the natural effect of wood by all means why change that which suits your fancy.

I live in a 1850s Victorian. I have natural wood trim that has survived 160 years. And it's....awful to decorate around. It's just orange orange orange.

If if it was a darker tone or even the same tone without the orange it would be different.

I do fantasize about painting it but people tell me that would be crazy. Plus I would still be stuck with an orange floor.

The only color that that looks good with it is navy blue. But in a way it just activates the orange even more.

So while ole wood can be seen as beautiful and worth keeping, you have to look at the Quality of the wood and the color tone. Because both make a big difference.

i do love cool grays for wall color but they just don't work even this BM Bennington Gray isn't great what would look best is deep Victorian jewel tones but I just can't live in a dark cave like that

any advice on wall paint colors or if it's possible to stain the floors or trim darker (it's pine which I've heard is very hard to stain ) would be appreciated.

below is a pic of my wood trim

Truey, That does look like good quality wood. I have seen on Houzz some homes of your home's vintage that let the wood be--just let that issue go, and went and painted the walls Euro-white. With well-curated furniture (Think Argentina meets Scandinavia meets Japan.), built-ins for your books, and a few pieces of good, big-format wall art (paintings or woven art), it looks so terrific. It's *almost* a simple, cheap solution, but the catch is that it may require you to splash out on getting help with furniture and art to pull the sophisticated "deep" modern look together. I love, and I'm not alone, a combination of modern blank white & aged character, either in a new build (cheating and importing someone else's stripped architectural features), or with a little more consumer integrity, strategically updating an older home like yours.

Here's what I mean:

https://www.houzz.com/photos/harvard-street-eclectic-living-room-houston-phvw-vp~88084196

Here (below) is a patrimonial capitalist version, but you can extract ideas from it, like big art, and maybe, if you need to open up rooms, considering the elegant, light-enhancing, high double museum interior doorway approach--It's just really one more doorway on a wall, plus transoms. Or you can remove the wood trim from one of the doorways, lengthen it, and make those twin entries art-museum modern. I've seen before/after with that more structural, but fairly small-time reno, and it is an aesthetic game changer. My recommendation is to stop worrying about the orangeness of wood, and start figuring out how to bring a crisp, whitespace modern embrace to the organic, complex features you've already scored.

https://www.houzz.com/photos/jamesthomas-llc-eclectic-living-room-chicago-phvw-vp~532688

i was fortunate: all of the trim in my 1870 house had already been painted before we bought the house.

we still have the original front doors, but as they cant be opened and closed when the humidity soars to over 10%, and snow which blows under the front door into the foyer doesnt melt... their days could be numbered.

(and yes, we've had 3 experts try to repair them. pffft.)

Well apparently white trim IS a selling point. So much so that people are "digitally staging" their houses when there is wood trim.

I was was looking at sold listings in Illinois online in nice neighborhoods. This house went on the market in January for 1.2 million, dropped the price twice, and sold in June for just under 1 million after going under contract in May. So 5 months on the market.

I believe I ts considered one of the best neighborhoods on the North Shore, so it is interesting that it took so long to sell.

They included these photos in the listing. On Houzz people say you devalue your house when you paint, but clearly here the natural wood was seen as a potential liability

I would not purchase with the dark trim. The white trim is so inviting.

No one has brought up the main issue I have with white painted Victorian (muliti-layered. complicated) wood trim. All the horizontal trim collects dust like you wouldn't believe. I have four sets of stair spindles (two in home, two in a rental.) They are a devil to keep clean. I hate cheap llght oak cabinets, but my banisters and other details in oak? I love them. It's all context. If I could afford to remove that white paint back to oak, I would in a minute.

Our old house was a 1960s era ranch with the typical cheap wood trim which I painted white, including the kitchen cupboards. No one ever brings up how dirty white cupboards get. My husband is a great--but sloppy--cook. I was CONSTANTLY wiping down those stupid cupboards. Plus you are constantly touching up chipped paint. I said "never again" to all the work of painting and upkeep of white woodwork and cupboards. We moved into our present house 10 years ago which was built in 1992 with all of its golden oak woodwork and Amish made custom oak cabinets. I know they must be just as dirty but you'd never know it because it doesn't show :)

I have a 1915 house and when we renovated (a total gut reno) 10 years ago, we put stained oak trim on the main floor and in the upstairs halls, but painted the trim white in bedrooms and bathrooms. I honestly think it's a travesty to paint lovely old gum wood, which is prevalent in many older houses in Toronto, or beautiful oak, which is used in Craftsman homes. Right now, there's a spectacular Craftsman house for sale in my area that has been renovated absurdly. They left the fabulous oak in the dining room and den, but painted the trim in the living room, which is between the two other rooms, and put in a French chateau type of fireplace. They painted the trim in the large addition at the back, which is acceptable because it is indeed new, but the front areas look like a dog's breakfast, style-wise.