Baseboard (aka the project that morphed into ten other projects)

Sometimes you start a project with a completely reasonable timeline. And sometimes said project morphs into 3 or 4 interconnected projects. And then the new, bigger, morphed project ends up taking way longer than originally planned. This is the story of our baseboard installation, that turned into baseboard installation, quarter round installation, interior trim painting, interior door remodel, interior door painting, and new interior door hardware. Yaaa…. We got a little overly ambitious! But let’s start with the baseboard 🙂

Here’s our house, pre-baseboard. I love that you can see all of the previous paint colors used on the walls…

While I was off galavanting around Twain Harte for our annual girls weekend, Justin and my dad were choosing and preparing baseboard for our entire house. That’s right: every room!

Girls Weekend = Boas and Galavanting. You know you’re jealous!

So happy to be painting! Who knew it could be so much fun?

Nancy and Dirk came down for the weekend to help us with this project (after, of course, I had finished galavanting and Justin had finished painting baseboard). After a quick trip to the hardware store (as most project weekends start!), we got down and dirty with our baseboard. Literally, down and dirty… We spent most of the weekend crawling around on our hands and knees and none of us (or the house!) managed to stay clean.

Pre-baseboard installation. As you can see, things started off relatively clean. That didn’t last long though!

Justin and Dirk measured and cut the baseboard (and re measured and recut at times!) while Nancy and I ran around moving furniture, cleaning, nailing the baseboards in, and caulking the nail holes and the spaces along the top of the baseboard (you know, that gap between the baseboard and the wall). We were such a mess by the end of the day, covered in saw dust and dried caulk. But we had accomplished our mission and finished it all in one day!

Planning

Cutting

More cutting

More cutting

Nailing

Caulking

More caulking

So we would have felt super awesome about our accomplishment, but about half way through the project we had decided that we would need to add quarter round oak between the baseboard and the floors to really finish off the project. You see, our beautiful floors that we worked so hard on are not quite perfect. In more than one place, there were gaps between the baseboard and the start of the wood floor. Also, our floors aren’t perfectly level and our rooms aren’t perfectly square; all things that were made obvious by our baseboard installation but could be covered up with the quarter round oak. Funny side note: when Justin and Dirk were talking about “quarter round” I thought they were saying “cord around”. I was sooooo confused and could not figure out why they would want to put some stupid piece of cord around the baseboard. Then I figured it out; silly, silly me!

Baseboard = Love

So our baseboard project as originally planned had been accomplished. But we had essentially doubled the amount of work we had to do! So we ordered the quarter round oak and waited (impatiently) to finish this project.