Molding around basement ceiling

[bmuir]

I am going to help my son put up a molding around the ceiling of his newly finished basement. Drywall goes nearly to the ceiling. The molding will finish off the job.
The ceiling and everything up in it has been sprayed flat black. It looks great.

Question is: Can I assume that all the exposed joists are level with each other? So we can just butt the molding up against the joists and keep going around the room? Am I asking for any trouble taking this approach?

Comments welcome.

Thanks,

Bill

[LarryG]

Perfectly level? No. But no house ever built is, so I doubt you'll encounter anything any different than anyone else would while running crown moulding or whatever. That there is no gypsum board on the ceiling is immaterial: if it was there, it would be applied directly (i.e., not shimmed), so it would just follow the plane of the bottoms of the joists.

Actually, your concern should not be whether a particular series of joists are level, per se, but rather whether there are any major variations in their bottom elevations. If the moulding runs slightly but consistently uphill or down it's NBD, but if the bottom of the joists don't all lie on approximately the same plane, you could end up with a gap somewhere. But the joists are presumably all bearing on the same thickness of sill plate, so any variation should be minimal.