Please remove your reading glasses and don’t zoom in on the photos. I did not clean the steel columns and floors, nor did I touch up the walls before this photo shoot.
Douglas was a tremendous help with the baseboards. He had the skills and tools (and knees) for baseboards.
Similar to the pine window trim, Sam and I helped to process rough pine slabs into 5″ tall baseboards for our bedroom. Thankfully our bedroom is small, and we weren’t using pine in most of the other rooms.
We made the landing and office baseboards out of doug fir to match the wood flooring. As mentioned before, doug fir is much easier to work with. We even made a straight 13 ft long board!
I thought wood baseboards would make the living room look too rustic, so we purchased 5 1/2″ primed pine finger-jointed moulding.
On a side note- we now understand why most pine products like this are almost always finger-jointed. Since it’s hard to find a clear, straight, section of pine that is longer than 6 inches, they fit a bunch of short segments together.
I wanted the baseboards in the living room to be a true white to contrast against the wall color. I picked a traditional profile to match the look of our kitchen cabinets.
Our bathroom also got white baseboards.
The shop bathroom got black baseboards to match the door.
Hopefully Sam doesn’t get too distracted admiring the trim while he’s using the urinal.
The only downside of the primed moulding was that I had to hand-paint it all. It was still snowing out, so we got a water-based paint that wasn’t too volatile for the indoors. Most trim paint is too thick to spray, which is why we didn’t take it to the painter. I rolled the gooey substance and lightly sanded between coats. It took awhile to figure out the best technique for rolling the black and white paints, but I eventually achieved ultimate smoothness. Dust has no chance of sticking!
On the plus side, the primed moulding was quite noodley, which allowed it to follow the contour of our not-so-flat walls. I imagine most moulding products are forgiving since they are thinner and have a relief on the backside. (In other words, don’t make your own baseboards.)
The pine and fir boards we made have zero flexibility. Imagine fitting a 2×6 against a wall. There are some gaps I need to fill in the office.
Since the floors aren’t flat, Douglas used his track saw to cut a matching profile along the bottom edge of the baseboards. He often had to go back out to his saw a hundred times to fit a long board. I was glad I wasn’t involved. My main job at this point was to grab Buster every time he snuck into the living room. He would pretend to be asleep and then take advantage of the unlocked door whenever Douglas exited. (The cats can’t be trusted during daylight hours, so we normally keep the door locked and invite the cats in at night to watch TV.)
The most tedious part of the installation was notching the baseboards for the steel columns. The coloumns sit on a bed of grout, creating a stepped profile. Douglas has a fun tool to replicate these unique profiles. It was similar to the toy at a museum gift shop with all the pins that you stick your hand or face in. Only his tool had a locking mechanism for the pins that allowed you to trace the shape. The funky cuts turned out well.
Douglas was a good sport about the columns; however, his complaints about the framers (Sam and I) were relentless. Since our building has horizontal girts instead of studs, the was nothing to nail the baseboards to in most locations. Occasionally Douglas ran into some blocking under a window or for an outlet. Otherwise, he had to use glue and creativity. We had no idea we were supposed to nail boards behind the walls along the floor!
After some more griping and another tube of glue, he was done! We promised Douglas if we ever build another building, we will let him inspect it and add blocking before the drywall. Apparently we should have put blocking in everywhere so we wouldn’t have to use drywall anchors for things like the towel rack, toilet paper holder, and closet shelves. Oops!
The rooms look more finished now! Some day I’ll fill and paint all the nail holes (and touch up the walls). I hope your readers are still on top of your head and that you refrained from hitting the “zoom” button.
Also, our cats don’t actually watch TV. They just sleep in funny positions while we watch TV.
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