Door Casings!

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Oh hey...remember that one time I was all like "Oh, life has been crazy but things are back to normal so I'm going to post more"? Yeah, me either, because it never really happened outside of my head! Then again, I'm sure life will calm down a bit when the kids get older right? Like, when they go to college? Until then though, we are having a blast, and apparently not posting about it!

Since the last time I blogged, you know, back in 1974, we have been busier than ever and wouldn't you know we decided to head full force into moving and selling our house!


But unlike King Julian, as The Squishy would say, "I no like to move it, move it."

It certainly sped up our schedule and list of things to do around the house, and yes, I did make a spreadsheet that could be sorted on date, week, priority, completion, you name it. More on that another day though. I know, the suspense is killing you.

One of the things that we had to get done and something that I have wanted to do for a long time now was to finish our Door Casings in the entry way. When I say a long time, I mean a long time, like since February of 2012. Remember way back when we did our Board and Batten in the hallway? We set ourselves up to eventually do the Door Casings, just never got around to it. So since February of 2012, we have been living with this random board jetting up the wall at the end of our hallway.



Well no more! Here is a crappy cell phone picture of what the foyer to dining room doorway looked like before. (Check out that sweet tall board on the left).


We basically followed how The Charming Nest created their Door Casings, with a few minor changes here and there based on our doorways. I won't bore you with a lot of the details because we pretty much followed the instructions on The Charming Nest's blog to a T. We just had to make a few minor updates based on our doorways like how much the top molding overhung the sides, etc. A lot of the pictures are also quick snaps on my cell phone but you will get the idea.

The first thing we did was measure the width of our vertical boards and removed that portion of our baseboards so the upright boards would sit flush against the walls all the way down to the floor. This was pretty easy with using our Dremel Multi-Max, which is rapidly becoming my favorite tool. 


Next was adding some of the larger pieces of the woodwork. I think we followed the advice from The Charming Nest and added the top horizontal pieces first. Then little by little we added the vertical side pieces, and then a 1x2 board (laying on its side) along the top. Borrowing my brother's nail gun certainly helped this process move along (although that thing still scares the you-know-what out of me). Luckily, most of our light switches and outlets weren't in the way. We did have to trim a bit of the plastic light switch cover in the playroom but that was it.


Next, we added some smaller lattice pieces to hide where the wall met our new wood. We also added a piece along the top to fancy things up a bit. Most of the bigger pieces came primed already, but we figured we would be priming and painting most of it at the end after filling in the nail holes and caulking, so most of the lattice we painted after installation.



We also added some cove molding, similar to what we used in our Board and Batten Hallway project directly under the top 1x2 piece (you can see it in the picture above). The casings looked a little rough until these smaller pieces got added, which started to had a pretty big impact on the overall look.

Oh, and we still had that little issue of the baseboards. In order to cover the giant holes in the floor (ouch), we boxed out the bottom of the door casings which had another big impact on these babies. This was probably one of the tougher parts because we only had a small circular saw, so these 6" wide pieces had to be flipped over mid cut in order to cut the whole thing (our blade wasn't big enough to cut them all in one slice). Wes did a great job though and there wasn't anything that couldn't be fixed after a little spackle and caulk and paint!


Since it was a whirlwind of a project and has been a whirlwind of a couple months, I don't have the best before and after pictures, but here are two shots from our MLS listing where you can see the finished product! It made a huge difference to our entryway and really jazzed up the downstairs!


It was well worth the hard work and we couldn't have done it without the hubby and my Dad!! Great job guys! (I get the easy parts of using the Dremel, spackle, caulking and painting)! This is definitely  a project I'd love to do in the next house, if we ever get there!

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