Kenilworth: Trimming the Walls, Instead of the Halls

During the blizzard, the trees in our yard were magically transformed. Look at the gigantic evergreen in our front yard!

We thought it would make a beautiful Christmas Tree.

Since that week, the temperatures have continued to be mostly frigid, with a couple of brief warm spells here and there. But that’s ok; it has given us time to do some more inside work without having any competition from the yard or other things.

With birthdays and Christmas celebrations taking up any little extra money we had, we set aside any further work on the trim or other projects in December. But the past few weeks, we’ve been able to move forward again.

Baby steps count! Smile

The trim in the mudroom and hallway and our bedroom has long been at the top of our list for the next big chunk of time and money. In order to cut the time and money into more manageable bites, we have decided to work on one doorway at a time. Although it probably doesn’t seem as though doorway trim should be expensive, it is.

Each doorway requires 9 pieces of trim. 3 pieces per “leg” as well as for the lintel. And strangely enough, to me, trim boards can be pretty pricey. Especially if you need 9. The prices vary depending on whether you are using wood vs MDF, primed vs. non-primed, the length, width, and especially the type and grade of wood.

We decided that the doorway which used to be the garage entry, before it became our mudroom hallway and bedroom entry, was our top priority. Because we used different flooring in the remodeled section compared to the hardwood which was already in the rest of the house, there was a difference in floor height between the two of about an inch or so. And it was an unfinished inch.

This is important because it means that the probability of stubbing your toe on that one inch of exposed hardwood planks has been pretty high.

Very high, in fact.

Also, the twins and Olivia are still deep in the stage of life where they are little girls for only about 20% of the day. The rest of the time they are animals; particularly horses or dogs. So they are literally galloping on their hands and knees across that unfinished inch of knee-scraping, hoof-tearing, paw-pad shredding cliff many times throughout the course of a typical day.

Although I don’t have pictures of the damage it has caused, suffice it to say our Bandaid supply has been severely diminished.

It took some ingenuity to figure how best to bridge the height difference smoothly, but my Renaissance Man saved the day. He put a wide board over the threshold, then used a small piece of 1/4 round trim to smooth the transition on the mudroom hallway edge.

See those little splintery looking places that are pointing upward on one side of the threshold board? Those were places where the flooring had peeled away, due to our feet and other things scraping and catching the exposed edges. A couple of months ago, I put pieces of clear packing tape over them to keep them from being ripped any further, until we would be able to address the threshold.

Once Glenn put the threshold piece in place, I took the packing tape off, sanded the floor there, (and in a few other places where little divots had been gouged into the floor by the enthusiastic carrying, and dropping, of the vacuums), taped off those squares and repainted and polyurethaned them. (sanding lightly between each of the 3 coats of poly)

It was so much better!

Now I needed to caulk the little nail holes in the trim and threshold, prime the pieces which were not pre-primed, and then paint.

Since I was doing the trim around that doorway, I decided it was the best time to do the rest of the trim in this little hallway. I hadn’t decided whether or not to paint all of it when I did the windows, but over the course of months, I realized I would like it better if all of it was white.

Surprised?

Here is a look at the hallway.