I'm Board!

The molding work continues. I've been ripping, stripping, and shaping reclaimed redwood to make molding for the third floor. So far, it's coming along reasonably well. No major injuries to report, in other words.

This is a representative sample of what I've been making. It's five inches wide, and this particular piece is about eight feet long. Each length is different, since I'm reusing the basic baseboard trim that was already installed upstairs, and they were all different sizes.

I'll eventually have to piece these together, but so far I've been able to do the first five doorways using just single pieces of trim with no seams. I'll have to stitch together shorter pieces before long, but I'm saving those for less conspicuous locations.

I'll also need to go out and buy some more lumber, since we weren't able to reclaim enough wood to do the whole job. So the first doorways will use original wood, while the later ones will have new wood. Sadly, I don't think I can buy redwood at any price that will be as good as this old stuff.

Each piece required three or four passes through the molding machine. You can't carve out that much detail all in one go. The first pass allows me to make sure everything's lined up properly. Then the later passes take out more material, until it's all done. For example, this piece here still has leftover paint -- several different coats, in fact -- from its days as baseboard trim. One more pass through the machine should take that off.

Once these pieces were all cut, it was time to move on to the baseboard molding. That's a whole different profile, so it meant taking apart the machine and retooling with different knives.

The good news is, I could reuse different pieces of reclaimed redwood that were too narrow to use for the door trim. Somehow, the DPO used a mixture of thick and thin baseboard trim. The thick pieces are more than 5 inches wide, but the thin pieces are just under 5 inches, so I can't use them for door molding. But they make dandy baseboard trim!

This profile rests on top of a basic slab molding, so that the whole stack is 9 inches high and looks pretty similar to the original stuff that's downstairs. Unlike the door trim, the baseboard trim is not an exact replica of the original. Just a close facsimile.

Last of all come the plinth blocks: the thick base piece at the bottom of each side of door trim. It's the same profile as the baseboard molding, but thicker. The door trim is supposed to look like it's resting on top of the plinth block, like a Roman column. Whatever.

Naturally, we had to make these from scratch, too, but they're pretty easy. We start by cutting 5-inch sections of baseboard molding (both pieces) and then nailing/gluing a 3/8-inch piece of wood to the back. This gives us the profile we want, but thicker. Then you just nail that to the wall and you're done!

Here's a batch of them sitting out to dry. After the glue has set up I sand the bejabbers out of them to remove any seams and to hide my nail holes. I can do the edges with the belt sander, but sanding the contours requires hand-sanding and a lot of patience. It gets old after a while.

Speaking of getting old, I started hand-sanding every single piece of molding after it came out of the machine. The knives make nice sharp cuts, which is good. But the molding looks too "new." So I knock down the edges and the corners with some hand sanding, just to soften it up so it doesn't look like it came right out of a machine. I probably don't need to bother -- it'll get nicked up soon enough. But even so, I'd like it to start out looking like it's been here for 100 years.