Trim & Fit

This is what we've been doing for the past several months. We're trimming out the top floor. And we're this close to being finished -- just like always.

The baseboard molding, door trim, and medallions are all reproductions of what we have on the first and second floors of the house. Almost all of it is reclaimed redwood that was already here; about 20% of it is new wood.

Here's a shot of the baseboard. The bottom five inches (the flat part) is new wood that we cut to size. Everything above that is reclaimed redwood that we milled out in the garage using the big molder/planer (otherwise known as the Sawdust Generator 2000).

I forget how many linear feet we made; my notes are around here somewhere, but it was a few hundred feet, at least. We had to trim every upstairs room, including three bedrooms and a hallway. (The upstairs bathroom got its molding in 2012.) Kathy's room, in particular, is large and has a lot of funny angles because it includes the round "witch's cap" tower. It's not fun guessing and testing angles for a pseudo-round room.

Remarkably, we didn't make any wrong cuts or waste a single piece of baseboard trim. What little leftover pieces we have are now back in the garage to use for repairs or templates for a future project, if necessary.

We also had to fabricate our own plinth blocks (the pedestal pieces that the door trim rests on), like the one on the far right of this photo. These are also duplicates of the size and style used downstairs, reproduced in existing redwood with a bit of new redwood and pine added. They're made with the same molder/planer profile as the baseboards, but much thicker so they stand out. I think we made 20 of these. Three doorways needed four apiece, but four doorways are "one-sided" and get just two. Everything was sanded, primed, and painted in Antique White (really!) paint.

Baseboard molding seems really easy, but of course it never is. Nothing is ever straight, plumb, level, or meets at 90 degrees. A miter saw is definitely helpful, but I rarely got to set it to that nice 45-degree stop that normal people get to use. Kathy's curved tower room was one problem area, but even the "square" rooms aren't, really. I had to tweak most of the cuts by one or two degrees to get everything to line up.

On top of that, the floors aren't always level. They're very, very close. If you place a ball on the floor it won't roll. But if you place a spirit level on top of the baseboard molding, it won't be exactly level. So then you have a decision: Do I level the baseboards and leave a (very small) gap underneath, or follow the floor and have slightly cockeyed baseboards? The answer: Do whatever looks best.

I split the difference. The lower portion of the baseboards follow the floor exactly, even in places where the floor isn't level. Then the upper trim portion of the baseboard is level, leaving a small gap between the two pieces, which I fill in to remove any shadow. It looks pretty good, IMHO.