Are You Board Yet?

Wednesday was woodworking day. And the project of the day was to strip and repaint the base molding in the upstairs kitchen.

That's trickier than it sounds because the kitchen cabinets are now in entirely different places than before, so none of the molding will fit back in its original location. Instead, we have to cut and combine pieces to fit the new arrangement. There's one long wall, in particular, that has no cabinets on it so it needs one long piece of base molding.

Which is what you see here. The molding is redwood, like most everything else in the house. It was painted white (also like nearly everything else), which is fine, except that the white paint was about the 23rd coat of paint on this miserable board. So rather than add a 24th coat, I stripped off all the old layers first, then primed and repainted it... white.


I did that to two of the longest pieces we had, then mitered and joined them together. I also took the opportunity to fill in some of the bigger gouges and holes with wood putty. I didn't want to make the molding look perfect (as if) but did want to remove some of the nastier bits of character it had acquired over the years.

Now that it's all done it looks like... white base molding. Big deal, I know. But that's two days of work yer lookin' at right there. Admire it. Now.