ORC Spring 2024 Week 2!

One Room Challenge Springs 2024 | Week 2

It’s Week 2 of the #OneRoomChallenge and we are deep into this loft play area makeover! A few weeks ago we prepped this space as part of our stairwell overhaul. You can read more about our prep and the stairwell overhaul on my new blog post soon!

After our walls were smoothed out with skim coat, primed, and painted with our favorite white paint, Valspar’s Bistro White, we were ready for the next step of connecting the crown and baseboards with the rest of the stairwell. 

One of the things with installing these baseboards is that we have to think ahead a bit. Right now, we have boring, greige builder carpet, that is gonna go, but is not in the plans for right now. Soon enough, we’ll install white oak engineered floors up on this level, but that will have to wait for now. Since we know we want to install new flooring, it’s best to take this into account with regards to the height we install the baseboard. For example, some areas of our carpet only take up ½” from the subfloor, whereas the engineered floor planks take up ¾” from our subfloor. That means you’ll need to move them up by a ¼” after the new floors are put in. It’s not a big deal, until it is….

In our case, the plan for this area is to install a box trim detail on the main hallway wall which requires having detailed spacing that looks balanced with baseboard, chair rail, upper boxes, and then crown. This means ¼” difference or more can make it look a little off. Whereas, when we redid the floors on our main floor, moving up the baseboard didn’t impact the beadboard detail or the plain walls since there wasn’t vertical pattern for your eye to notice. Of course, we’d love to have the floors go in first, but for right now, we measured out the depth of our planks and installed the bottom of our baseboard at that height so we could measure everything else off of that. 

If you've never installed base board, it is super easy! The hardest part for me, aside from figuring out the spacing with the floor planks, was picking out which one we wanted. Since I love a more old world classic style I went with a larger more detailed base board proportionate for our 9 and 10 foot ceilings in our home. From there, I started exploring more tips and techniques for getting a seamless professional look. Some of my favorite resources have been 1980’s library books from Black & Decker. Here are a few things we’ve picked up along the way: 

1. Get the longest boards you can buy and cart home to minimize the number of joints you need to make. Plus, it makes installation so much faster. 

2. You want your longest run of baseboard to be on the wall, opposite of your entrance…aka the main wall you will see when entering a room or space. For us, that’s the hallway wall. 

3. When joining two pieces of baseboard you want the seam or joint to face away from you when walking into the space. For example, when we walk into the loft, the main wall we see is the hallway wall. This means that we need to cut our longest run with an ‘outside angle’ 22.5 miter towards the right so that the angle faces away from us when we walk into the room. The next joining board will have a 22.5 ‘inside angle’ miter pointing left that you will glue together to join the boards. Doing it this way makes the joint visually less noticeable because it’s facing away from you when you enter the room. It’s a bit old school, but it does make it difference in how polished it looks. 

4. End your baseboards in a way that looks good to you. So many builders use the cheapest way possible for trim which means plain boards without details, which in turn, means little need for craftsmanship in joining boards and ending them. Often you will see a slight bevel to end baseboards at stairs or other termination points. For us, we chose very detailed baseboard that is ripe for beautiful terminations. As I researched I found a few options...

Blunt end-this is a straight cut that you do usually when coming up against a door jamb. We did this on our entry way.

Bevel-a 30 degree minor cut on the end of the board that can be used terminate boards at open transitions like a stairwell or level change. I used this technique to create the pillars of our door casing.  

45 self return-this you make a 45 degree bevel 'inside angle' cut off of the end of your board. You then use another 45 'outside angle' cut on the remaining of the board. Then you glue the small piece onto the end of the board to create the 'return'. This makes it look like the board is turning into the wall. This is a common way to terminate any molding that is ending at an opening, like an outside corner, change in levels, etc. We've done it a few times in our projects.

45 miter return to the ground-First you figure out your distance to the ground (aka the height of your baseboard or how far you need the return to go). Once you have that measured out, you then cut a 45 back towards the lower corner of your smaller piece. With your longer board you then cut another 45 in the opposite direction towards your furthest corner. This will ultimately leave you with an isosceles triangle as waste. After that, you match your two 45 cuts and the pattern of your board to create the look of a turn going into the ground. This one is our favorite and a game changer for making the base board look so good!!

That’s it! Once you find your rhythm you’ll find installing baseboard is super fast. One last tip, use a trim remover and an exacto knife to pull the old baseboard. We recommend keeping the old baseboard for scrap wood. We’ve saved a ton of money being able to reuse our 5” baseboards for other projects. 

Up next is finishing off the trim install and moving onto the box molding! Follow along @lueckyhome on IG for daily updates on our #OneRoomChallenge progress!