Builders Share

A Board Too Short

Another Saturday rolls around and I'm back on task to completing the upstairs bathroom.  When I walked away from this project a couple weeks ago, I still had about 8 lineal feet of wainscoting to install, along with baseboards and door casings, and a bathtub to paint and install as well.

Today I hoped to finish up the wainscoting but ran into a few snags.  The first problem came at the very start.

When I started installing the wainscoting back in August, I started my first board at the south east corner of the room. It was important to keep the wainscoting plumb, and since the east wall is not plumb (after 150 years) I couldn't place the first board flush to the wall.  I don't know what I was thinking at the time, but I decided to simply leave a gap to be dealt with later, and later was today.

It would have been better if when starting the wainscoting I had trimmed a piece that could go flush with the "unplumb" wall on the left while maintaining "plumbness" on the right. Now I had a small gap to deal with which meant cutting a narrow, odd-shaped piece and hoping that it didn't come out looking ugly.

Filling that little gap took a lot more time than if I had taken care of the oddity at the start, but with some fancy table saw cuts, a compass, perseverance, and cursing, I got it done.

The next problem came at the same corner where I had installed the baseboard on the south wall leaving a gap to account for the wainscoting that would be installed on the east wall.  Again, I don't know what I was thinking back in August, or whether I just wasn't, but I had left too large a gap.  This meant another narrow odd-shaped piece of material to make up the difference.

I have to give myself some slack because this is the first time I've ever installed wainscoting and my finish carpentry experience doesn't go much further than what's been described here.  The end product is far from being a disaster.  If anyone wants to go sniffing around the corners of my bathroom looking for errors, I suppose the deserve everything they encounter.

The other two mistakes of the day were the more pedestrian kind. (1) I ran out of wainscoting and had to take a trip to the building supply store for more, and (2) I wasted some baseboard stock by cutting a piece too short.

The latter mistake came about by measuring without taking account of the floor not being level--another old-house anomaly.

Tomorrow I'll be back behind the saw finishing up what I started today and be one more step on my way to completing the bathroom.

handyman

~!@#$%^&

Painting started in earnest just a day or two after I plastered my last wall.  I was hoping to maintain as much of the textured look of the plaster and simply tint it with a color wash but I don't have any experience in that area.  I asked the folks at the paint store and a friend of mine who's been a painter for a long time and they both suggested priming the plaster to insure that any other color added to it would adhere well.

I'm disappointed by how much the primer "homogenized" the surface and I'm kicking myself more than a little for not experimenting with a color wash.  I've already primed the two bedrooms upstairs so the only walls left to experiment are the ones in the hallway. (The bathroom should be primed to prevent mildew from forming on the plaster and to provide a washable surface.)

The error comes from rushing to get it all done.  I just didn't feel like I had time to experiment, having set myself a deadline to move upstairs by June 1st.  Unfortunately, there's no going back from this mistake short of skim coating the walls again which would probably qualify me for institutionalization.

This is really a hard one to swallow, but it's only an aesthetic issue and we're practically sick of using only half of our house.

handyman