The Hunt Begins

Now that the third floor has, well, a floor it's time to start on the next phase of the project: new molding.

The upstairs never had the same nice molding as the two lower floors. Instead, it's all just 1x6 painted in a variety of 1960s colors. We want the third floor to be as nice as the other two, so we need to duplicate some of the same trim work. Trouble is, the stuff downstairs is 120+ years old and they aren't making it anymore.

But we foresaw this problem. That's why we planned ahead and bought a secondhand Jet JPM-15 planer/molder, a massively heavy machine that turns ordinary wood into beautiful custom molding. Just push the button and whoosh! instant molding pops out. That's how it works, right?

Well, almost. There might be just a wee bit of prep work involved, but we'll talk about that later. For now, I need to find a way to replicate these rosette corner blocks. They're exactly 5 inches square and made of redwood, but I'd be happy with pine or just about anything else. It's easy to find similar corner blocks at a lumber yard -- heck, even Home Depot has something close -- but they're all too small and missing the octagon around the central rosette.

I don't have a lathe, so I can't make my own. And I don't know how I'd make the eight straight sides anyway, except maybe with the router. It would be tedious, but it might work.

I'd much rather find something ready-made, but I can't find any equivalents online. If anyone out there knows where we can get some, let us know! We'll even offer a bounty of... uh... some sacks of redwood sawdust.