Warning. This story contains no humour, literary devices, anecdotal digressions, abstract tangents nor historical discoveries. It is entirely technical and DIY-geeky as is proper for a renovation blog. You are of course at liberty to interpret this is a good or a bad thing.
One of the last “easy” jobs to complete the living room was to improve the skirting boards, as the existing skirtings were made of cement very roughly and unevenly with no decorative moulding. At the time I didn’t have a angle grinder (and firmly believed I would never own one) and didn’t know the the technique of cutting them off. So when I was making the new step I had to remove a big arc of cement skirting which rose up alongside the steps which was in the way. I began chiselling it off but it started to take half the wall plaster off as the 100 year-old plaster is blown in some places – it was a nightmare. We realised then how hard it would be to remove the offending skirtings without damaging all the walls and ending up having to replaster the whole room. And we were so close to finishing!
So I decided to cover them up with “fake” skirtings. All I had to do was get skirting boards of the right profile with a 100×10-15mm rebate cut out of the back to match the meandering profile of the current ones and glue them over the top. Easy! But when I came to design them I quickly realised that the rebate would reduce a typically 19mm board down to 4mm thick which would be very fragile in such a long piece of timber. It would probably split or warp and one kick could mean a significant repair project when we’d already gone into renotirement and hocked our tools for gin.
So I decided to fashion a matching set of Frankenstein’s monsters from bits of moulding, ply and shims. The 4mm ply would be strong even though thin and I could shape the shims to fit the wandering walls and crumbly cement. On the eco side, I wouldn’t be wasting any wood as I wouldn’t need to route or rebate anything.
I tried using my new jigsaw, one of many reluctantly-bought powertools I reserve for special occasions, flicked the laser guide on and began ripping down the 3mm ply feeling all futuristic and cyborg. I was one with the machime; I had a new limb with magic powers but at a terrible price. It made a horrible mess! The blade wandered and tore the wood into a nasty splintered edge. I needed a dead straight, clean edge if I was ever going to fit this together so perfectly that you wouldn’t know it wasn’t a real single piece of wood. So I reverted to Gen’s trusty old tenon saw and spent hours cutting the huge floppy sheets into 3 metre long strips with incredible manual accuracy, putting the laser to shame.
Then it was a seemingly endless task of making up all the shims and bracing pieces to attach the flimsy ply to the moulding for enough length for the living room and dining room – about 24 metres. Mitring round the chimney breasts was interesting as I had to do the mitres on all the separate pieces in advance of gluing them together, and not get confused between inner and outer mitres. Luckily all the shims were made from reclaimed wood from the demolished Cabernet Monstrosity so any mistakes wouldn’t have the forest animals weeping into their decimated landscape.
But the biggest challenge was the sheer amount of peices to glue together and the sheer lack of clamping options in my toolkit once I’d use both of my clamps plus the mole-grips. So I set about the house searching for anything heavy including paint pots, rocks, bricks, books on surrealist art, my biggest plane, hammers, sandstone and very well trained possums. Soon the living room looked more like a Dada installation at the Tate Modern than a living room.
After an evening of carefully tip-toeing around this rather dangerous assault course of sharp heavy or fragile things, I set about solving the eternal paradox of the four sided-mitre puzzle. The secret of course is to gently bend the wood, like a reed in the autumn wind and be thankful you’re not renovating MC Escher’s house.
Of course the house threw one more dimensional spanner at us just to prove that no matter how hard you try to think things through there’s always another dimension you’ve missed. It turned out that the walls weren’t all straight, I don’t mean plumb or square as I’d checked that – some were actually curved! So we had to fill the gaps behind the skirts with hideous muck from a spray can which I’m sure I will live to regret.
One it was all done and fitted, sanded and painted I must admit it really did look quite smart. I’d matched the profile to the older plaster skirtings in the front half of the house so now there was this sudden feeling of consistency and integration between what had previously been two halves of the same house. It’s like playing music – if you do anything enough times it just starts to sound right.
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