Upper Body Work

Once the baseboard trim was in, it was time to start on the big project: doorway molding.

Our doorway trim downstairs is exactly 5 inches wide and was probably carved onsite when the house was built in 1893. It's all beautiful redwood, including the plinth blocks and the 5-inch square medallions in the corners. Sadly, that trim was never installed up on the third floor. Or if it was, it got removed at some point.

So we set about duplicating it by removing the basic, flat redwood trim that was installed here and milling it to reproduce the antique profile. Unfortunately, the boring door trim that was installed upstairs is less than 5 inches wide, so we couldn't simply carve it and put it back. Fortunately, the flat baseboard trim that was installed upstairs was slightly over 5 inches wide, so it became our molding stock. In the end, the old baseboard trim became the new doorway trim, and the old doorway trim became part of the new baseboard trim. Nice!

We don't have a lathe, and I don't have the talent to reproduce the corner medallions, so we were considering having someone make reproductions for us. (Thanks, volunteers!) But we noticed that the house has two slightly different styles of medallions already. The ones on the first floor are a little bit different than the ones on the second floor. So why not add a third style on the third floor? We found a mill on the East Coast that made a medallion that closely resembled the other two, so we bought a stack of those.

The new medallions were too big, so we cut them down to exactly 5 inches on a side. This is trickier than it sounds, because you can't just cut two adjacent sides to get the dimensions you want. You have to center the design and cut exactly the same amount of material off of all four sides. Probably easy for an experienced woodworker; slightly troublesome for me.

Cutting the medallions down leaves them with flush-cut edges that don't look nice, so I ran them all through the router table to add a slightly sunken roundover edge. Then we added some grooves to the pattern using the table saw. In the end, the new medallions look very much like the old ones downstairs.

The door trim itself we've documented elsewhere. We made miles of it, or so it seems. It really is an exact match for the original trim because we used a piece of trim as the template for the molding knives. Because we're reusing the old redwood, it tended to splinter in places, and because it was used as baseboard trim for decades it's beat up, dented, and has holes drilled through it in odd places. It was a challenge to allocate the holes and dents in such a way that they wouldn't show. Can I get a clean six-foot piece for this doorway? Can I use that ugly piece over here? Where can I fit this short piece?

Lots of hand sanding removed some of the uglier blemishes, but it was never going to look new. Nor should it. The way we figure it, it's pre-blemished. Don't they charge extra for that in the furniture stores?