My House's Trim and Molding

Here's a recurring problem with our house: the structure has semi-ornate wood trim, used uniformly throughout the house, inside and out. You work on the house and in the process, pry off some decorative wood trim, like that nondescript piece of wood just under the roof eaves (the cornice). In the process, you destroy the piece of wood. No problem, right? A quick trip down to Home Depot, a stroll down one of the lumber aisles, and you've yourself got a close-enough chunk of wood that matches, right? NO.

In fact, that chunk of wood was old-growth redwood, cut to a pattern found only in dusty architectural digests. There's nothing even resembling it at Home Depot, nor Minton's, nor OSH. That piece of trim you destroyed hasn't been available for purchase since the Great Depression.

Heaven help you if you happen to own a really ornate house, like a Victorian! This person ran into the same problem, and will clearly spend the rest of his life trying to reproduce the the little doodad curliques in their door lintels.

That's the TrimAndMolding problem.

Doors and Window

Even though our house isn't a Victorian, it does have plenty of decorative wood throughout the house. For example, here is a typical doorway.

Ignoring the door itself, I count 5 distinct types of trim. Starting from the top:

1. crown molding
2. frieze
3. crosshead piece
4. casing
5. base block

We've decided not to implement the base blocks, which means one less thing to purchase.

Windows are even more hairy! The interior of each window consists of 10 pieces of wood, representing 8 distinct types of trim:

1. crown molding
2. frieze (1"x8")
3. crosshead
4. casing (1"x6")
5. ogee stop
6. sill
7. apron (1"x4")
8. cove

The exterior of each window has another 2 types of trim, so installing a single window means purchasing no less than 10 different types of wood in various shapes and sizes: planks, moldings, stops, etc.

None of this would be so bad if weren't for the fact that many of these pieces simply aren't available any more (the TrimAndMolding Problem). For example, we've looked for the crosshead piece, and apparently it's extinct. In the website I mentioned above, the author allocated 2.5-7 hours entirely to duplicating the crosshead piece by improvising from other available pieces.

Purchasing the wood for windows and doors is an accounting nightmare for several reasons:

1. When you first step into the lumber store, it's never clear if the part you want actually exists.
2. It's not enough to add up the lengths, because there is the additional constraint of minimum lengths (the door casings, for example, must be an uninterrupted 8').
3. It's hard to keep track of the distinct types of wood, along with the required minimum lengths.

Excel comes in handy for such situations.

Baseboard

In comparison, baseboard is easy. Our baseboard consists of only 3 pieces (the baseboard, a "shoe" composed of a quarter round, and a cap). Unlike windows and doors, it's easy to compute how much material to purchase: simply add up the lengths.

CategoryHouse