Baseboards and door casings

My girlfriend has a lot of experience with home improvement work so that helps out a lot. I, on the other hand, am a complete novice at this stuff, so I'll just share my experience with you and maybe you could pick up some tips from some of the lessons I learned from trial and error.


It's amazing how much baseboards and door casings improve the appearance of the interior.  I've never really paid much attention to it before.  My girlfriend convinced me to have the trim done in the bathrooms, and after seeing the outcome decided to take on the rest of the house. It sounds straight forward and fairly easy, but it could be sooo time consuming and a lot of trial and error learning since my research on this topic on the interwebs was pretty disappointing.  On top of that, there are so many decisions to make - colors, materials, tools, methods... ugh.  


How do you plan on cutting the trim?  Are you looking to do the 45 degrees at corners?  Do you have a miter saw?  The miter saw makes 45deg angles for corners a piece of cake.  So, I highly recommend investing in one if you decide to cover your entire house yourself.

The key tools we used were the following:
- pen and paper
- 25' tape measure
- miter saw
- electric finishing nail gun
- loads of 1" & 2" brad nails
- many tubes of caulk

For the baseboards, we went through the house and carefully took measurements noting which type of cut each end would be - since the front of my trim was white, we referred to each 45 cut as "more white" or "less white" and a 90 cut as "straight".  Then, we performed the cuts and after each cut, checked how it fit on the wall (didn't actually nail it in).  It was very important for us to ensure that the baseboards were able to lay flat on the floor.  Any protrusion had to be dealt with.  Do you have to remove your baseboards and casings?  Home Depot has this blue crow bar tool that makes prying off baseboards fun.  In retrospect, I wish I had pressed up the trim along the wall to check for wall curvature.  After cutting and joining, we essentially used caulk (white - since our trim is white) to fill the gaps and cover up nails.  After this weekend, I had never said the word "caulk" so much in my life and, not to mention, praised it.  Caulking worked well in my case since I purchased MDF material as opposed to wood trim.  I chose the MDF material because I was not looking to stain wood, but just simply paint it white.  Also, it was much less expensive.  If you decided to go with a finished wood trim, then perhaps wood putty would work out nicely except that wood putty tends to shrink (or sink in) after drying in case you're filling wider gaps (so you may need to reapply) while caulk dries as it appears so a clear drying caulk (as opposed to caulk that dried with color) could potentially be an option for sealing if your joints are already looking nice.  After nailing, I learned that the walls in my house are not flat at all causing more unexpected surface area resulting in some instances of too short of a cut!  So, if I had known that earlier, I would've left a hefty 1/10" of trim for error for the much longer walls. Caulk seemed to patch up nicely those errors in length we had though - so all is still good in the world. 

For the door casings, we re-measured each door way presuming that they'd be different... which surprisingly to me, they were. all the measurements we used were based on the inside of the door, or the shorter side of the casing. Again, we used the miter saw, but rather than tilting the blade at 45deg, we swiveled the blade 45deg to perform the cut.

P.S. we purchased baseboards and casings that were as long (in length) as they could be ordered. This way we could reduce the number of segments on the longer walls and have less seams.

P.P.S. order extras.

bathroom duties

back on track!  tim the tool man/contractor has been working his bum off and has done a great job on his bathroom duties.  hehe... i said doodies, how appropriate.  so the bathrooms are just about ready.  the floor tile, shower tile, fixtures, trim, and paint are complete.  the style and white trim and baseboards look sharp!  i was surprised at how such a small detail could add such a nice effect.  i'd be up for adding those baseboards and trim to the rest of the house.  i'm pretty happy with the paint color too.  it is a pleasant pewter tray.  and the acrylic shower floor looks good - i don't regret not getting the tile shower floor one bit.  the less grout the better in my mind.  

man, if i could find my camera, i'd post some photos.  

can't wait to see the windows!  and once those are in, we could have the rest of the security system installed.  very exciting!!!

Unfortunate discoveries

Rotted beams in a load bearing wall in hall bathroom needed to be replaced.  The inside of the wall was exposed after demolition to the shower.  The air fan duct had a tear/hole in it which may have been caused by rodents likely fed moisture into the wall for some unknown period of time.  

Bedroom acoustic ceilings required additional work caused by the paint used on the ceilings.  

A rusted drain in the master bathroom shower.  So rusted that the contractor needed a jack hammer to remove it.  Also, discovered that some pipes need to be replaced.

Large tile laid on walls are considered an upgrade to the contractor which makes sense.  Large tile is heavier and requires some time to set before proceeding to the next set of tiles to prevent crooked lines.  Didn't realize this at the time we picked out tile.  Hopefully the tile store allows me to exchange some of the large tile for smaller tile.  Otherwise, mo' money, mo' money, mo' money.

Minor unfortunate discovery: The two drain and waste and overflow systems that I know of have drawbacks that seem to be equally annoying.  There is the old school system for the tub that has a toggle switch on the overflow to stop/open the drain.  These types of drains were more appealing to me because the cover allows less long hair to fall down the drain.  However, the toggle switch and connection to the drain may after some time have issues and need to be replaced which is kind of a pain in the arse due to its complexity relative to the "easy touch" system.  The "easy touch" system allows you to stop/open the drain by pushing or pulling on the pre-attached stopper.  Nothing attached to the overflow.  And most people agree that it looks nicer because you can't see the drain.  However, there is no good hair catching mechanism.  Ideally, there could be a screen or a cover similar to the one on the old school system a couple inches below the pre-attached stopper that is screws on to the middle of that cover to easily remove and clean the drain.  Why doesn't this exist already?  Since they both have drawbacks, I decided to go with the one that would be easier to install and pop the screen out and replace with the "easy touch" cover in the event of a bath.  But, of course, that system wasn't available in the right color so all that thinking for nothing - old school system by default.

That's all for now.

P.S.

if anyone knows how to poop or grow new money, i'd like to know.

blue water bamboo floor

It took the contractor a week or so to get back to us with the bid after the walk-thru and assessment of the work I was hoping to have done.  New windows, new fixtures and tile in the bathrooms, and removal of the acoustic ceilings.  All these things were probably never replaced since they were new, back when the house was built in the 60's.  This house needs some serious TLC.  He was able to break it down and itemize the work into a comprehensive list which simplified the perusal which in turn keeps the reader (me) in a calm and content state of mind which in turn allowed me to be more accepting of the string of numbers that represented the total cost at the end of it.  He actually gave us an awesome deal on all the work which he estimated would take him about three weeks to complete if no unexpected mishaps occur.  

After meeting with the contractor last Sunday morning at the bar down the street to sign the contract, I learned that they were going to begin demolition by the end of the week which meant that I needed to choose and purchase the fixtures and tile ASAP.  And we were off to home depot.  I had come across bamboo flooring in bathrooms on HGTV which was a nice eco-friendly solution and thought that placing them in the bathrooms would be a nice test run before replacing the rest of the flooring in the house with them.  It was difficult, however, to get any consistent research information on bamboo flooring from the interwebs.  Many sites said that bamboo flooring, since it is a grass, not wood, is extra susceptible to shrinkage and expansion just from variations of humidity.  Other sites would argue that solid bamboo floors with a top coat of urethane stand more resistant to problems caused by moisture and humidity than some hardwood floors.  Of course, there are different qualities and types of bamboo flooring (ie. naturalized vs. carbonized, horizontal vs. vertical construction, solid vs. engineered) and of course many sites many sites had contrary opinions on these types.  I was leaning toward a solid, horizontal-constructed, bamboo flooring with the special titebond adhesive.  Still, this was the internet talking so we took matters into our own hands and spoke with a flooring salesperson over at a local flooring store.  He disclosed that bamboo flooring is NOT a good idea for highly humid areas such as bathrooms and that we would see "cupping" and swelling of the surface very soon.  Still, this was salesperson who would probably prefer to sell tile flooring since bamboo is fairly inexpensive.  But I was tired of doing research on it  (almost to the point where I seriously considered laying down concrete with a layer of epoxy in the bathrooms) and didn't want to take the risk and I needed to get materials soon so that made the decision easier to go toward tile except now there are many different types of tile and colors to choose from.  Fortunately, E and D were there to lend a helping hand in offering fantastic suggestions and two hours later, we had the majority of the materials chosen.  

If anyone has more information or experience with bamboo flooring, I'm interested in hearing about it.

The Front Door

The front door was very weathered and had finish peeling off all over it.  We definitely either needed a new one or do something about this one.  We opted for the most economical route of course - sanding, staining, and finishing.  Luckily, the part of the door that faces the inside was still in decent shape so we only needed to work on one side.  And D had most of the tools we needed for sanding already.  After spending a much needed 2 hour tour at Home Depot getting supplies and browsing paints, bathroom sinks, tile, windows, sliders, door knobs, and your mom, we took on the front door.

Sand, sand, sand... all day long.  Sand, sand, sand... while i sing this song.

4 hours of sanding using 120 grit sand paper, a sanding belt tool, and a detail sander.  We generated a boat load of dust that day.

When the sanding was all done, we applied the stain which was a stain, finish, sealer all in one.  The stain we chose was called Dark Walnut which actually turned out a bit darker than expected, but in the end aesthetically was a bonus.  That took a couple hours to dry and it gave me a chance to install the door knobs for the other doors leading outside in addition to scream and run from a couple spiders that tried to attack me.  Yes, they attacked me and I'm pretty sure they wanted to seize me and bring me back to their web fortress for dinner.  But unfortunately for them, they were unable to catch me with my ninja-like reflexes and fast-twitch muscles that allow me to run like the wind.

6 hours later of hard work and live DMB playing in the background, we were able to put up the door.  We'll have to go back and add the polyurethane weather sealant though which could potentially take a good chunk of the day to apply a couple coats and dry.

We decided on the darker brass door knobs.

I got the hizzle for shizzle

The month of August was a grueling one filled with a million requests for signatures and initialing and all kinds of documentation.  But I finally closed on that house in Cardiff today.  There are many home improvement projects to be anticipated so hopefully I'll have some time to post some photos and document them here.


The other day I met with the notary at a Starbucks to sign all the docs.  It went fine.  Just took 30 min when she said it would take at least an hour.  She turned the pages for me while I signed which made things kind of convenient.  A lot of the docs were things I already spent an entire Saturday reviewing on my own so I suppose it went quicker than she typically experiences since she didn't have to explain as much.  My favorite part was when we got to the domestic partnership page.  She read it out loud and I marked the "No" box.  And as she turned the page, she came out with what seemed to be one of her typical comments when she gets to that page with clients and said, "Yeah, I didn't think that applied to you."  Then, I noticed she did a double-take on me with her eyes above her reading glasses.  LOL.  She was being kind of a stickler though with my signatures.  She actually made me modify my signature so it had my middle initial in it.  ...which is actually very different from my normal signature since I don't pick up my pen between my first and last name.  and then, there were times when I just had to sign my name without my middle initial.  So I figured I could do my usual scribble that I used for the last 10 years or so, but no... I had to re-sign the same way I signed the signatures, but without the middle initial.  Ugh.  It was very unnatural and weird.  I don't understand the reasoning behind any of the trouble.  I mean, isn't the notary there to witness the fact that it is indeed me signing?  so the way I sign should make no difference.  And I would think that they'd want a signature that matches the history of my signatures... not something totally new.  For instance, D could've walked in with my ID and said she was me and signed everything the way the notary asked her to.  On top of that, she was listed on the closing costs at $300!  But I did learn from her that escrow over-estimates costs.  So, I nodded and went along with it.