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.
