The dining room
A couple of weekends ago my wife suggested that we paint the dining room. It was in need of a fresh coat of paint so we decided to go for it. We had to paint the ceiling and our hopes of saving the apple border by painting around it were dashed (by me) so that had to go as well. We decided to do a two color thing where the bottom color was a deep cranberry (that required three coats) and the top was a cream color that looked really good when paired with the cranberry. Then we decided that the chandelier had to go (it truly had to go) and that we needed new baseboards and a chair rail.
I had only cut a few baseboards in my life so I set out to do the best I could with them. The hard part was, of course, mitering the inside corners with the typical 45 degree cut on either side. We have four corners so we needed eight cuts. They turned out a little better than I thought they would but we are going to have to put some wood putty in (I love wood putty) so that I can fill in a few small gaps.
I thought that I would miter the chair rail just the same but when I put it up to test out the cuts it looked awful. I mean it was an embarrassment even to me - and that says a lot. Well, I had no choice but to figure out how to cope the joints and...surprisingly...it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. The trick for me was to figure out the angle that I needed to hold the coping saw at and also to get a notch out of the back of the rail so that I could follow the face of it closely. I also had to get some files to do the cleanup because I didn't want to get too close to the face of the rail with the saw. The files were great and performed better than I thought they would.
I am still going to have to putty the joints, but they look a lot better than the miters I had cut earlier. Also, if I could have gotten the hang of coping when putting in the baseboards I would have coped those instead of mitering them. Oh well...next time. The chandelier and apple border is up (and look great) so the next big project is to attach the baseboards and rail to the wall and then do the finishing work with the putty and tape. That is, prayerfully, going to happen this weekend.
I had only cut a few baseboards in my life so I set out to do the best I could with them. The hard part was, of course, mitering the inside corners with the typical 45 degree cut on either side. We have four corners so we needed eight cuts. They turned out a little better than I thought they would but we are going to have to put some wood putty in (I love wood putty) so that I can fill in a few small gaps.
I thought that I would miter the chair rail just the same but when I put it up to test out the cuts it looked awful. I mean it was an embarrassment even to me - and that says a lot. Well, I had no choice but to figure out how to cope the joints and...surprisingly...it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. The trick for me was to figure out the angle that I needed to hold the coping saw at and also to get a notch out of the back of the rail so that I could follow the face of it closely. I also had to get some files to do the cleanup because I didn't want to get too close to the face of the rail with the saw. The files were great and performed better than I thought they would.
I am still going to have to putty the joints, but they look a lot better than the miters I had cut earlier. Also, if I could have gotten the hang of coping when putting in the baseboards I would have coped those instead of mitering them. Oh well...next time. The chandelier and apple border is up (and look great) so the next big project is to attach the baseboards and rail to the wall and then do the finishing work with the putty and tape. That is, prayerfully, going to happen this weekend.
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