Day 517: The holy gloves

You can basically read 1.5 years and 2 rooms of hard work from the state of my work mitts. 2 pairs of my trusty Mechanic gloves have now completely worn through - good thing I had them or my fingers would have looked like this

Day 515: Trying on some skirts

This post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while now .. reason being is that I never finished off the work. But like many things in the house it's about 90% there .. so you'll have to settle for a post that is about 90% there too.

Anyway, today's topic is skirting .. granted when many people think if me and skirting, they probably think something like ..

But this post is about the other kind of skirting ,, little bits of wood that go around the walls to cover all the imperfections and make everything look tidy. 

And as the flooring was down and all the cabinets installed it was finally time for us to tackle the skirting. 

I went with some chunky ogee style wood rather than MDF as I just don't trust MDF - cardboard is fine on my cereal box but I'm not convinced of it as a building material. What this meant was that the wood had to undergo a bit of prep work before installation. First the wood had to be treated with knotting compound to make sure the knots don't bleed through.

Boards were then measured and cut on a 45 degree using my hand mitre saw. The professional way is to use an electric compound mitre saw - but I don't yet have one in my arsenal of equipment so good 'ol manual it is. I have saw horses but they were being used for painting the wood - so a lawn chair also worked just fine (and they move a lot less than small children)

Once cut, the boards were then primed with a couple of coats of primer/undercoat.

The plaster on the walls wasn't 100% straight so I had the option of either shaving off wall or shaving off wood so the skirting would sit flush. I elected to do both... Here it's the trusty Dremel with a sanding drum.

First corner done. I used some GripFill and screws/plugs to hold in in place.

One of the walls was longer than the 2.4m skirting so I had to butt join 2 lengths of skirting together. I cut one end at 45 degrees so that the other one would overlap on top and make a reasonably flush joint. 

The inside corners are always a bit of a challenge. Many a debate on the DIY message boards (see DIYNot) but the general view is that scribed cuts are better than mitre cuts for inside corners. I'm sure there is some good scientific reason behind this - like wood expansion, relativity and the rotation of the Earth - but I'm just a simple builder so just I went with what most people recommended.  

For scribing, I needed to enlist the help of a new tool - a coping saw. Basically all you need to do is cut a 45 and then follow the profile of the edge with the coping saw. The more ornate the design, the more of a challenge this will be. Luckily for me, I only had to deal with one inside corner so I could take my time and get the edge right.

The finished corner, looks pretty good I think ..

And the other bits .. 

The only thing that's left to do is fill in the gaps with some wood filler, prime once more and then put on a gloss coat. I was going to do this a while ago, but I got distracted with other house tasks and moved on. So like many a thing in the house, it's 90% there.