Half Bath Renovation: Base Molding… Part 1

Do you ever start a project and wish that you’d just gone with the original plan? Hand cutting hardwood base molding definitely falls into that category.

After we had finally located base and shoe molding that matches the molding surrounding the hardwood floors in our house, I primed and painted it white to match the trim around the window and door in the half bathroom, and gave those another couple fresh coats too. Normally I am not a fan of painted wood, especially when it is a beautiful stain grade, but I was not about to strip the paint off the window and door trim, so paint I did.

So yesterday after the paint was dry I thought, should I wait till my partner gets home so we can go to his dad’s house and borrow his compound miter saw, or should I just hand cut the pieces? Logic was apparently not on my side, because I chose the latter. I guess I figured that it being such a small space with minimal cutting that it wouldn’t be such a chore, but I figured wrong. Oh, so very wrong was I. Very, very, very wrong. I mean really, very, absolutely, incredibly, exceptionally, awfully, exceedingly, most definitely wrong.

I really wanted to surprise my partner with the molding finished when he got home, but what I didn’t take into account was that hemlock is a fairly hard wood, and our cheap plastic miter box isn’t exactly the most stable of tools since, well, we don’t have a table to make the cuts so instead I was on the floor of the kitchen and the damned saw kept getting caught in the grooves at the top for the saw insert and kept making high pitched squealing noises that sounded quite like my voice after eating pineapple that one time when I was thirteen. Long story short, it was a pain in the ass and I have blisters to prove it.

But, to make this sound not completely like I didn’t have any success, I did a ton of research and found a website with a diagram quite like our bathroom and instructions for installing base and shoe molding using the “Butt and Cope” method. I know, it sounds dirty and makes me giggle like a little school girl when I say and read it too, but this looks like how our current molding was installed back in 1956 and I’ve never seen a gap at the corners so I figured that it must work. Basically you make an inside miter cut like you would for a typical forty-five degree install, but using the cut line as a guide, take a coping saw and trim off the mitered edge, leaving you with a perfect contour to butt up against the straight cut molding. And this takes time to do, but will eliminate the need to figure out the exact angle since we all know our house isn’t perfectly square, and will allow the wood to shrink and contract without any gaps showing.

While I wanted to get the base and the shoe molding up, time wasn’t on my side and I was only able to install the base molding. I know, this room is tiny and I should’ve been able to accomplish this all in an afternoon easily, and with a compound miter saw a matter of minutes, but I really took my time to measure, mark, and measure again and mark again if needed so that all my cuts would be perfect. That is, until I came upon the tiny little piece that fits between the door and adjoining wall where there is only an inch to work in, half of which is taken up by the butt joint of the base molding. This piece still hasn’t been installed because, well, I need to keep filing and sanding it down to fit because my original measurement was an eighth of an inch too big. Yes, this piece has quite possibly become the bane of my existence.