A Bit of a Foot Fetish

This house requires a lot of woodworking. Good thing we've got a lot of wood. And sandpaper. And power tools!

Down in the kitchen, there's a doorway that needed some trim. It had been removed at some point in the past and replaced with simple, flat boards. We wanted to restore the original fancy redwood trim. Luckily for us, there was another door that had had its trim removed, and we could reuse that. Unluckily for us, only some of that old trim remained. The rest we had to fabricate.

We put up the reclaimed trim back in October, but it was heavily damaged, so we had to add onto it with some homemade prosthetics. Once that was all stripped, sanded, and painted, it looked pretty good.

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, "a man's legs should be long enough to reach the ground." But our trim did not. The original doorway and the new doorway were different sizes. The reclaimed-and-patched trim was a bit too short. And the little footer pieces that sit at the base of the trim were lost, so we'd have to fabricate those from scratch.

I started with some leftover redwood molding that we'd used to repair windowsills when the house was painted last year, added some redwood stock to the bottom of it to get the right height, and put a pine backer on the whole thing to get the right thickness.

It's not an exact match for the original footer, but it's close enough. I wish now that I'd turned the redwood stock 90 degrees so that the grain ran horizontally to match the molding, but since it's getting covered with paint it won't matter. Still, it bugs me.

Here's a finished footer installed next to an original (and badly banged up) doorway. The new footers are a bit taller because the doorway is taller than its neighbor. After the first coats of primer and paint, I could see that the new pieces looked too "new," so I sanded off all the square corners and nicked and scratched it in a few places. On top of the footer, the left one-third of that vertical door trim is all new, too. I figure in about 20 years and another 15 coats of paint it will all look just like the original.