I had a dilemma... Do I leave my furniture in the middle of the room or move it all back to reasonable locations? I have baseboards!!! They look great and it's a shame that they are so hidden. Yes, that means I decided to move my furniture back.
I used the long weekend to tackle baseboard installation on the main level of my house and they are all installed! For many, many months they had all been painted, but taking up space in my dining and living room. I installed them in my bedroom earlier in the year and forgot I hadn't blogged about it, so here it goes. My bedroom was a good starter room. The baseboards in my bedroom consisted of one baseboard per wall with inner corner cuts. Four walls. Regular corners (no odd angles). Two doorways. Not too difficult.
Then, there's my downstairs where the living room, dining room, and kitchen all connect without doors, lots of inner and outer corners, and one length of wall that would need 2 pieces of baseboard and 3 pieces of shoe moulding. Let's not forget the flooring transition between the dining room and kitchen because the flooring is not level. This is a picture of the transition (and my cat) and the baseboard with a sketch of the porton that needed to be removed in order for the baseboard to fit around the transition.
I used the long weekend to tackle baseboard installation on the main level of my house and they are all installed! For many, many months they had all been painted, but taking up space in my dining and living room. I installed them in my bedroom earlier in the year and forgot I hadn't blogged about it, so here it goes. My bedroom was a good starter room. The baseboards in my bedroom consisted of one baseboard per wall with inner corner cuts. Four walls. Regular corners (no odd angles). Two doorways. Not too difficult.
Then, there's my downstairs where the living room, dining room, and kitchen all connect without doors, lots of inner and outer corners, and one length of wall that would need 2 pieces of baseboard and 3 pieces of shoe moulding. Let's not forget the flooring transition between the dining room and kitchen because the flooring is not level. This is a picture of the transition (and my cat) and the baseboard with a sketch of the porton that needed to be removed in order for the baseboard to fit around the transition.
I don't have a jigsaw so I used a hacksaw, dremel, and my miter saw to make the cut at the bottom of the baseboard so it would fit around the transition. It wasn't perfect, but the imperfect cut would be hidden by the shoe moulding. However, the angles for the shoe moulding were also fairly impossible. My tool that measures the angles doesn't work well with small segments, so I had to recreate the angle with two pieces of paper and then could line up the tool with the paper edges to figure out the angle. For instance, the angle for one transition was around 165 so each piece needed to be at a 82.5 degree angle. I set the miter saw at 7.5 degrees and had to figure out the directions to cut each of those little pieces. Plus, one side needed to have an outer angle cut to fit around the wall (45 degree angle with the moulding positioned a different way). And the other piece needed some sort of angle to fit with the shoe moulding along the dining room floor... but the floor transition doesn't angle all the way to the floor. Of course, there's a slight lip to make it just a little more difficult.
I didn't stress about it too much though. I did the best I could and used some spackle to make it smooth. I'm pretty pleased with the results. I did fill in the nail holes with spackle, but eventually I'll need to add some caulk and do touch-up paint.
Even though I did my baseboards on my own this weekend. I have to thank Kelli who helped me measure, cut, and install baseboards in my bedroom. She was WAY more helpful than the cat, who was particularly good at photo-bombing. The cat wanted to be in my picture of some of the tools I used for this process. That's a lot of tools. My dining room was the staging room and there were tight quarters, but I made it work.
Warning- the air compressor can get really HOT. I accidentally bumped it with my shoulder and have a little burn mark. Otherwise, I was careful with my power tools and was unscathed.(The yardwork I did this morning was another matter, but that's off topic).
This picture should also have included the tissue box that I used to keep the baseboards level with the miter saw while making the cuts. It served dual purposes because the saw dust also made me sneeze some. :)
Don't they look good?
