I struggled with how to run the crown on the wall with my rangehood between two windows. On this thread where I was asking for help, you can see a few different pics of crown and hood treatment. Maybe one of these pics will help. Here's what I ended up doing. No crown. I will, when I pick tile, run it eurosplash style on the whole hood wall. Here is a link that might be useful: Pics of hood-crown treatment

Patrice -- there are tons of pics of our siding on my website, along with the whole story of why we were residing (and re-roofing) a 6 year old house in the first place. We went with the smooth lap siding and used a 4" lap to simulate the siding on old clapboard houses. The siding was hung pre-primed and we painted it on-site with SW Duration Exterior. I believe I included some closeup shots of the installation details (metal flashing behind joints, how the hardie needs to be cut short at any roof-wall intersections, etc.) These are all things your installers should already know, but you might want to make sure they are doing them right, because if not, JH won't honor your warranty (they'll blame any problems on the installer and rightfully so, but that won't help you). If you don't want to sift through the whole saga, click the Show All link and go to the very end -- the last set of pictures (#382 and on) was posted after the siding had been up 4 years so you can see how it held up. Here's one: Good luck with your decision. Here is a link that might be useful: Our house...

Poor overall planning from the beginning to do this ''recess'' and not have a plan to either integrate the room crown into the design, or eliminate the room crown entirely. This is yet another reason drywall recesses are bad ideas to try to build in a fridge. They are neither fish nor fowl. You need around 1/2" on the sides for ventilation. You need to decide if you want room crown or cabinet crown, or how to do a transition between them, like with a plinth block. And the whole fridge and cabinet need to be pulled forward about 6'' to have this look like an actual cabinet instead of a hole in the wall. Yes, that means cacinet side panels.

I'd be inclined to suspect a combination of fan dampers not closing properly and gross overchilling of the bathrooms. Aside and editorial: I'm not a doctor, but I consider anything below about 75 deg F too much change from outdoors for good health in the summer. The hotter your climate, the more critical this is. Seventy-eight or even 80F is ample cooling when the outdoor temp is in 3 digits. It saves significant money on your summer electric bill, too. Overcooling the indoors also makes you more miserable when you go outside, because it inhibits your body's ability to adjust to the heat. As you've seen, overcooling can also cause house problems. If the bathrooms were in the 60-65 deg F range, that's excessive. I've never heard of a bathroom with more than one heating/cooling register. Is the bath that huge??? Try closing off all the vents but one. Leave the doors open when the bathrooms aren't in use. Remove the fans from their housings and check for proper damper operation. Clean the dampers and ducts thoroughly with a brush and vacuum. Lubricate the dampers (if necessary) only with a dry lubricant, such as Teflon or graphite. It sounds like the fans aren't really working all that well. I think that the 14' run to the cap is too much, especially with bends. You need a shorter path to free air. Consider ducting the exhausts straight up through the roof (example). The roof cap will also provide a redundant damper. Use rigid pipe.