Baseboards

Several years back we remodeled the back half of our house. It looked really good but I guess Lisa figured it is time to repaint. I do not like to paint. Before the kids came home for Christmas we were able to get the entire downstairs painted and new blinds put up so the house looked quite nice.

I even replaced the original base boards to match what we had done in the back half of the house. It turned out that we weren’t able to match the baseboard we had in the family room but by cutting down a similar style we were finally able to match it. I then had to stain it the right color. That was a hassle I won’t go into but by the time kids got here it looked nice.

This picture shows the corner where the old base board on right meets the new baseboard on the left. I think we managed to match pretty well don’t you think?

The one thing that I didn’t get done was a curved wall that we have by the front door. It makes a 90° bend with maybe a one foot radius. I was scared to death to attempt to put baseboard around that bend. It wasn’t done for Christmas and I have managed to procrastinate until now. While Lisa has been quite patient, she has been commenting on the one unfinished wall more and more frequently. Last weekend I decided to go for it.  

I had always assumed that if I soaked the board in water for a day or two that it would soften enough that I could bend it but when I asked experts they all told me that the only way I could get it to bend that way would be to pressure steam it. Well, since I don’t have a large autoclave, I went with the more conventional approach.

I guess what you do is make many small cuts on the back of the board so that the remaining wood is thin and flexible. I experimented with a small board and convinced myself that it would work.

After more than 200 cuts, I wrapped the board around the curve and was quite alarmed to see that the bottom of the base board hugged the curve very nicely but the top edge bowed way out.

Because I was able to make the cut on the bottom come right to the front edge of the board, the remaining wood at that point was razor thin On the top of the base however, I had to stop the cut at the inside edge of the board. That left a quarter of an inch thick of wood on the top edge. This made the remaining wood thick and stiff at the top but thin and flexible at the bottom.

After stewing (and a bit of stressing) about the problem I decided to force the top of the board against the wall using sticks wedged against the opposite wall. This seemed to work quite well. I left the board wedged in place over the weekend hoping that the stress would relax a bit. It did relax a bit but not nearly as much as I had hoped.

In order to hold the top edge of the baseboard in place I located all the studs in the wall and nailed the top of the base board into the studs. I also glued the board in place.

To complicate matters, there is a door right where I needed to place some of the braces so I laid a 2x4 between the wall and the step and braced against the 2x4. When it was all done it was quite the maze. It was a bit treacherous walking through there.

That was on Monday. On Tuesday I removed the supports and the top moved out a little bit in one spot so I re-braced that spot and gave it a bit more glue and one more day.

When it was as good as I figured it was going to get I went and bought some caulking and tried to hide as much of the gap as I could. That caulking is amazing stuff. I think my baseboard almost looks professionally done.

So I removed the last board on Wednesday afternoon and then headed to the airport to pick up Lisa. She was arriving home for her 42 hour layover before going to Canada. She was home for about an hour before she noticed the new baseboard. She loves it so that makes me happy.

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The pyramids were as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us
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