To compliment my traditional, 1920’s era window and door trim, I am replacing the baseboards. I can see rements of the original baseboards inside the kitchen cupboards. The same style is available at my local lumber yard, aptly call ‘traditional’. I’m as excited as anyone can get about baseboards.
Baseboards are hard. After watching a number of ‘how to install perfect baseboards’ videos, all I have to say is, caulking is king. I tried measuring the exact angle of my corners, cutting slightly more or less than 45 degrees (depending on whether it was an inside or outside corner) to compensate for the drywall mud in corners, and cutting off the back of the mitre with a coping saw, but ulitmately uneven floors and walls were the hardest.
But I carry on, trying new things to improve my skill1. Working on the second room now, I’ve cut the pieces in preparation for painting, leaving the long ones (8ish feet) about a 1/4 inch extra in length, to be cut down once I push them into place. In the first room, precisely measured cuts were a bit short, because they bowed in when tightly pulled to the wall with screws2.
Pretty pleased with myself this is all the scrap I had left after cutting. Tiles are 8″ square, for reference.
I made a return, for the places where the baseboard just ends, like near the stairs and along the cupboards. I’m not really happy with the look of these deadends, but haven’t yet found a good example of how this was done originally.
The finishing trick for making the reveal came from a video on making window aprons by Home Improvement Woodworking . It looks really cool as a finished piece of trim, but the angles aren’t right.
Fortuntely, I found another video, from Finish Carpentry TV that shows a different kind of return, so I made one of these too. Much better style fit for the base of the stairs. Thank you to all you who post how to’s on YouTube!
In the end, I went with the first version. While the second version looked better a ground level, I realized that wasn’t the way it would be seen mostly. No one would be kneeling on the ground, looking at the base of the stairs. I choose the version that looked best from standing, which I expect most of the people in my kitchen to be.
Cupboards are usually on top of the floor, so aren’t trimmed. The key here is – aren’t usually trimmed, so I changed my mind about the return and decided to go as minimal as possible, with a 1/2″ piece of quarter round. It fits nicely into the cavity with the phone cord too.
Painting works better with a small roller for baseboards – gets away from the brush marks. Much as I hate it, I’m now into one coat of primer and two coats of paint. Something happened to paint that requires multiple coats. In my DIY childhood, one coat was good unless you were covering something disgusting, navy blue, or burnt. But I gotta go with what is currently available which requires three coats for a nice finish.
When I looked up how to make the second type of return, I found the solution to uneven floors rocking (literally) the baseboards: Plane down the baseboard to make it hug the contour of the floor. Since the room I’m working on right now has freshly laid tile, I’m hoping for an even surface, but we shall see.
All is going according to plan except the one inch sag in the floor along one wall. How did I not notice this tiling? Every tile is level. And level with the next one. However, nine feet of straight baseboard tell a different story. Structural implications will be investigated separately – there are no signs of immediate distress, meaning the sag is old, could be related to adding the air vent.
The bottom of this baseboard can’t be scribed to compensate for the difference, because it needs to be the same height at the end to match the baseboard on the perpendicular wall. And, it would mean planing almost an inch off the baseboard at each end to fit the existing floor contour, which would look silly.
Must be the magic of geometry, making a cut in the baseboard at the lowest part of the floor (determined by rolling a marble around, and looking at the gap under a level), does a reasonable job of compensating for the dip. With a bit of cutting and filling, the fact that the baseboard is actually V-shaped is hardly noticable.
After adjusting lengths, finding wood to screw the boards to, filling fastener holes, caulking gaps and touching up paint, my external corners are sharp, internal corners intact and minor variances from floor height accepted. A moment to stand back and admire the job.
Next: Stained baseboards. But first a few more painted window casings to relax.
1 I am don’t pretend to have all the answers. There are probably pros out there that know how to do this. I am learning. And doing this my way, because I’m going somewhere else than ‘tear it all out and replace it’.
2 A nail gun with brads might make this easier, as there would be less pulling into the drywall. This probably makes a wonderful finish when the drywall is new and things are square, but mine ain’t.