Skirting boards

Time for a little update again. The last few weeks have been used to work on skirting boards and architraves around doors, etc. This has taken forever, well, at least it feels that way, but we now only  have about 2 half rooms left to do. Half the music room and half the office.

On the plaster walls and around the doors it has not been too bad, but it has really taken a long time on the straw bale walls. The main reason for this is as follows:

The straw bales rests on 390mm wide besser blocks. On the inside of this, we fixed a 70 x 45 mm piece of pine so that we would have something to anchor the skirting boards to. At the time we did not know exactly what skirting boards we were going to use, nor did we have the floor boards. Had we known those two factors, life probably could have been a bit easier, but not much we can do about it now.

The main problem is that the skirting boards we are using are 65mm high. With the floor boards and that matt underneath, this builds up about 20 mm. As such, there is only about 50mm of the timber strip still visible and the skirting board has to go up about 15mm into the bale wall. The walls not being straight thus has meant that we've had to use a chisel to get rid of a log of render at the bottom of the walls, to make room for the skirting board.

A few pictures to show you what we mean:

As can be seen, the skirting board could not get closed to the timber strip and still be at a right angle to the floor. As such, we used an off cut of the board and then scribed a line along the wall.

With a hammer and chisel the "excess" render was removed.

This is the result - looks really untidy !

Having then measured out the skirting board, cut it to fit, tested that it fitted, removed it again and then varnished it, we could put it in place and fix it with small nails.

We then used a bit of masking tape along the edge.

Then we used cap filler to make sure there was no open gaps anywhere.

Removed the tape

And we are quite happy with the end result. The only problem is that time it has taken !!

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008