If I Ever Write a Book...

...It will be titled "How to Remodel Your House 10 Minutes at a Time". It's been a long, slow, steady process but I finally got all the trim up on the second corner of the dining room. I literally didn't spend more than 30 minutes in any one day on this. Now all that's left is some priming, the finish coats, and touch-up. Oh yeah, and then the other two corners of the dining room, and restoring all of the windows in the dining room. Now that we've hit 90 degrees I'll be highly motivated to get those windows un-stuck.

A Taste of Things to Come

Here's a shot of the first corner of the dining room with the finished plate rail and wainscotting. I must say I'm really pleased with the results.

Dining Room Trim Profiles

Those of us lucky enough to live in Portland have two excellent local suppliers of traditional millwork. I used McCoy Millwork for all of my kitchen trim and Rejuvenation for all of the dining room trim. Sorry to say Rejuvenation can't ship any of its millwork, but McCoy will gladly ship anything anywhere.

This is a mockup of the plate rail I am installing in the dining room.

I kept the original baseboards (5/8" x 7-1/2") and ran the panel battens vertically between the bottom of the built-up plate rail and the baseboards. I removed the original base cap and used the #1723 panel stops to frame each panel section.

The sizes and item numbers (per the Rejuvenation catalog) are as follows:

1-1/2" x 3" Plate Rail - 4497
3/4" x 5-1/2" Flat Casing- 7721
5/8" x 2-1/2" Panel Batten - 9871
3/8" x 1/2" Panel Stop - 1723

Plate Rail Installed

Most of the wood is up in the first corner. The only thing left is the beading on the right panel and then finish priming and painting.

A little more detail.

I love it when the pieces line up with the layout marks!

No Heat = Motivation

I decided to start putting up the new moulding in the corner of the dining room that has the thermostat. Since the thermostat will be mounted on the new board, I had to unhook it in order to mount the trim. That was last night. Laziness got the better of me and I left the thermostat unhooked because I didn't want to go through the hassle of connecting all the wires only to unhook them again the next day. When I got home from work today it was 61 degrees in the house! I quickly set to work to get the trim mounted in that part of the room so I could get the heat going again. I learned the hard way that you should cut the power to your furnace when you unhook the thermostat. Some of the bare wires shorted and blew the fuse on my furnace control board. Luckily the auto parts store 2 blocks away had the replacement 3A fuse.

Anyway, here's what the trim looks like so far. I still need to mount the plate rail on top and the beading around each "panel".

I couldn't really get a good picture of this, but I wanted to show how I handled the junction of the new moulding with the old. The door casing is the same thickness as the new board, but the casing has rounded edges so the two do not meet flush. Filling the gap with wood filler would probably crack fairly soon, so I decided to go the opposite route and accentuate the joint instead of trying to hide it. I simply put a 45 degree chamfer on the end of the new board. Once everything is caulked and painted it will look nice.

Message to the Future

I left a note for the future.

Making Good Progress

I managed to spend a few hours this weekend scraping 3 decades worth of old wallpaper off the dining room walls. You can clearly see where the original moulding used to be. The more I uncover, the more motivated I get to put new moulding back up.

Now I need to decide if I should paint the walls below the plate rail the same color (red) as will be on the upper part of the wall, or if I should put in paneling and paint it the same color as the trim (white). What do you think?

Crown Moulding Finished!

Yipee!! The crown moulding in the kitchen is finally done! In fact, 99.9% of all the visible parts of the kitchen are done. Only the vintage stove is left to get refurbished and installed. Other non-visible things left to do are hooking up the fan and electrical for the vent hood and one light switch. The end is in sight!!!

Lesson Learned: Crown Moulding

I found out the hard way that priming the crown moulding after it is installed is waaay more difficult than priming before it is installed. Luckily, I only got around to installing 2 pieces before the cabinets went up, so I got all of the other pieces primed and painted last weekend while I enjoyed yet another beautiful weekend. (Am I still in Portland?)

Now I'm off to fill nail holes, sand, and prime again. All over my head. Ugh.

Finishing Back Door

I started by sanding the back door and taping each pane of glass.

It's amazing how much time you'll spend taping if you know you're going to put your work up on the internet for the world to see!

Finished! I figure I've got about 14 hours of work into this door. Ugh! But the finished product looks pretty good, so it was worth it. (Notice my new crystal doorknob from Rejuvenation.)

Splinter Repair

Did you know that SuperGlue (a.k.a. cyanoacrylate) works great on wood? I'm going to show you how I used it to repair a splinter in my moulding.

OOPS! When I nailed the lintel to the cap moulding, I didn't have it straight and on the last blow from the hammer it caused a splinter on the face of the moulding.

After I applied a liberal amount of glue to the splinter, I clamped it with firm pressure and let it sit for several hours.

Here you see the repair after the clamp is removed and the spot is sanded.

And here's the finished product. There's no sign of the boo-boo anywhere.

Quick Tip: Painter's Tape Pointer

Let's try a video Quick Tip. I apologize for the quality, but it's the best I could get out of my camera.

Now for the tip... In order to get a nice clean paint line when using painter's tape, it is very important that the tape be well-stuck to the wall. I like to use an old credit card (or one of those fake ones you get in your junk mail all the time) to "seat" the tape, especially in hard-to-reach places like around trim. Watch the video for a demo.

Something Finished

I know it's not much, but with careful camera placement I was able to capture a shot that shows only finished surfaces.

And one with our cool retro phone. Stay tuned for more...

Door and Base Trim Get Started

Today I started working on the door casings and the few spots in the kitchen that will need base trim.

This is the corner between the door opening and the cabinets that needs about 12" of base trim. You can see that I've left the required 3/8" gap between the Marmoleum tiles and the wall. Here's a tip: when you're doing the drywall, don't think to yourself "Oh, the bottom few inches don't need to be perfect, it'll get covered by the base trim anyway." It needs to be perfect, otherwise your trim won't sit right and you'll have ugly gaps. I spent a few minutes with a rasp getting the bottom 6" perfect.

Here is the trim mocked-up. I'm using 8" douglas fir base moulding and a simple profile on the cap moulding that matches the door and window lentils and goes well with the cabinet crown moulding. I applied 2 coats of primer before making any cuts to the raw lumber. Now that the cutting is done, I'll apply the first finish coat, install, fill gaps and nail holes, and the apply the final finish coat. Notice how I rounded the end of the white shoe moulding to give it a nice finished end. I also beveled the ends of the 8" boards where they meet the cabinets and the door casing because they stuck out about 1/16". I think the bevels will look OK once they're painted.

Here's a look at how I assembled the doorway head casing before installing. I cut the head casing to be 1/4" wider than the installed side casings, and the parting bead to be 1" wider. When installed the bead will overhang the side casings by 1/2" on each side and the head casing will be 1/8" wider on each side. This assembly will get its first finish coat prior to being installed.

Kitchen Window Progress

I need to keep reminding myself that just because I haven't finished a project doesn't mean I can't post an update. So here's an update on my almost completed kitchen windows.

I have all of the trim in place and it even has the first topcoat of paint. Nail holes are filled and gaps are caulked. All that's left is to sand the wood filler and apply the final topcoat.

I ran into one small snag while installing the head casing. Unfortunately, the windows weren't quite centered on the wall. They are offset by about 1" to the left of center. This meant the lentil for the windows needed to be trimmed asymmetrically. The pictures show how each side mates with the cabinet crown moulding.

To trim the left end of the lentil I made a paper template by tracing the pre-assembled head casing onto regular typing paper. I then put the template in place and cut the paper to an exact fit. Then I put the paper back on the head casing assembly and marked where to cut. I was hoping for a nice snug fit, but my hand-sawing skills are a bit lacking, so I had to fill the gap with caulking. (Please don't tell anyone!)