Welcome to week two of the One Room Challenge, where our goal is to finish installing and painting all the trim in our house within six weeks. We will show you our progress via the upstairs hallway. The One Room Challenge is hosted by Linda from Calling it Home. She challenges home and DIY bloggers to renovate and completely finish a room within six weeks.
Last week I introduced you to my plan for the One Room Challenge, which includes finishing installing trim, and painting all the trim and doors in the hallway. Once we are done with that I will decorate the hall with a colorful gallery wall.
Installing Casing and Baseboard
We bought all our trim and doors from Mountain Moulding in South Mountain Ontario. The trim we chose is from the Urban suite. It is primed mdf, and it has a very simple clean look to it. The casing is 3.5 inches wide and the baseboard is 5.5 inches tall.
Most of the trim was installed way back in October by my father. He installed most of the door and window casings, baseboards, and interior doors within one weekend. And then it stayed unfinished until now.
Installing the Shoe Mold
In case you’re not familiar with shoe mold, it is the small piece of trim that runs along the intersection between the baseboard and the floor. The purpose of the shoe mold is to hide any areas in the floors that are un-level. The shoe mold is much more flexible than the baseboard, and can be pushed down tight to the floor and hide any gaps.This week we finished installing the shoe mold.
How’s that for a riveting before and after?
We were also able to finish installing the shoe mold in three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the living area, front hall and mudroom, plus install some remaining trim in the closets. So we can check that task off the list.
Here are some of our tips to install interior trim:
- Install door and window casings before working on the baseboard
- For door and window casings, mark a reveal about 1/4 from the edge of the door frame
- Measure and cut your vertical pieces first, with a 45 degree miter at the top corner
- Then measure and cut the top piece, adjusting the angles until it fits tight
- Put some carpenters glue in the mitered corners, then nail those suckers together from the sides of the trim and also nail to the door frame. The glue will make sure those corners never open up
- Always measure twice, and cut once (or in my case – measure twice, cut, realize I cut the angle the wrong way, measure again, cut, now it’s too small…ask Tony for help)
- Once the casing is installed, measure and cut the baseboard, and nail it into the studs.
- I like to cut a scrap of wood 16 inches long, so I can quickly use that as my measuring stick to find the studs (studs are usually 16 inches apart)
- If there is a long wall, you can make a scarf joint to combine two pieces seamlessly. Again, wood glue is your friend for these joints.
- For shoe mold that butts up against door casing, do a return on the end. This finishes the end off nicely. Use a small amount of wood glue to attach the return piece to the shoe mold.
We did trim this week, too! It’s amazing how much work something no one really notices is! 🙂 I’ll be following along and wishing you the best!
Thanks! It really is a pile of work
A little trim goes a long ways! Looking great 🙂
Thanks, we’re getting there!
Love this Jessica – everything looks fantastic and your tips are hugely helpful!
It’s looking great! Trim work is so hard! It takes so much patience to get it looking good. Sounds like you guys are off to a great start!
Yes a lot of attention to detail and patience
Before and after riveting I know. I was the same crown molding vs no crown molding. Though painting two coats of semi gloss was a chore in itself. Can’t imagine doing the whole thing!
I love the look of your crown molding! Maybe someday we’ll do that, but not for a long while
We bought our place almost four years ago and I started painting our trim at that time. It originally had stained grainy oak trim and I decided to sand, prime and paint all the baseboard and trim in our house. I just finished the very last room last week! That includes around all doors and windows, as well. We replaced every interior door in our house with solid wood doors that were already painted white. Good luck on all you have to do yet! Looking forward to see it all completed.
It looks great! Painting trim is a pain, but so worth it.
Great tips! I love your shoemold. I’m tired of the quarter round one…but you swayed me with this. 🙂
I love how moulding amps everything up! The baseboards are beautiful!