All the trimmings

Hello all. In a whole house renovation people rarely talk about the seemingly small projects that consume a lot of time and effort. And we mean a lot. Continuing a topic we teased briefly before, we're going to do a deep dive on baseboards. Every room has them, they're the unsung framing element that makes a room look "done". 

For example, after taking up the carpet we got rid of all the old, ugly brown baseboard to have a clean slate after we'd painted and installed our floor in the living room (this process has been replicated in multiple rooms by now).

Installing baseboard is mostly a process of careful measurement, angle cuts on the miter saw to make all the 45-degree joins, and probably a few tinkering cuts to get things to fit (almost no corner in a house is exactly 90-degrees). Compare that to how things looked after we cut, nailed in place, and applied three coats of paint:

This transformed the rooms and also the hallway:

And of course the bathrooms:

One place we couldn't simply replace the baseboard was in the stairwell. Well technically we could have (it's a renovation, about anything is possible if you're willing to spend the time, effort, or money) but that probably could have required removing the stairs first. That didn't strike us as a particularly cost-effective approach. This is what we were starting with:

Our first step was to give everything a light sanding to rough up the surface to make it hold paint better. Then we put on a coat of primer.

Then we could follow with two coats of semi-gloss white. The advantage of doing this work alongside the raw stairs is that you only have to be really careful along the seam to the wall.

You may have noticed in those last photos that the bannister was the same ugly reddish brown. Well, presumably the prior owners liked the color, but it didn't fit with our brighter color choices. The handrail along the wall and the bannister got sanding and a couple coats of wood stain. 

That worked great on the railing and the main post of the bannister but the newels (the skinny posts between the main one of the wall) are cheap wood and the stain brought out all the weird imperfections and odd streaks of grain. Suffice to say we didn't like it. What to do? Well the semi-gloss white paint was handy...

We're pleased with how things turned out, but as always welcome your reactions and thoughts. This is a bit of a two-parter because in the next episode we'll recount the work we did to remake the stairs.

Until next time.