We helped friends yesterday with some finishing details in the new addition to their house, and I was once again baffled by the way trim works. Their contractor followed the standard approach today of putting up unfinished trim before the wood floors were finished and before the walls were painted. This means you can’t finish the back of the trim, and you need to carefully cut in as you finish the floors (impossible), walls (tricky), and trim (time-consuming). If you instead finish the floors and paint the walls without the trim in place, you don’t have to be as precise at the edges where they meet because those edges will be covered by the trim. And if you finish the trim before you install it, you don’t have splashes of paint and polyurethane to contend with, you can finish around the back, you can easily replace pieces where the stain doesn’t come out right, and you can apply the stain and polyurethane outdoors or in the basement or somewhere you don’t have to be careful of your new floors and walls. So there must be good reasons to do put the trim up earlier, though I don’t know what those reasons are.
Much of the time in the life of a house, trim is already in place. Our house shows no evidence of the trim being removed when walls were repainted or rewallpapered, nor when floors were refinished (ok, there’s no evidence of the floors being refinished). We are probably going to take the trim off in my office as we redo the walls, but that’s largely because we want to replace the trim. We certainly were happier working around the trim when we sanded and plastered and painted the walls downstairs. So aside from the trim already being finished, it creates all of the obstacles to easy refinishing that it creates in the first paragraph. Clearly what is needed is a new way to attach trim that allows the trim to be easily removed and reattached. If only screws with decorative heads were available. And if only the trim were finished before being put up, so that those screws didn’t wind up painted or polyurethaned into place.
Monday, November 12, 2007
How trim should work
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6 comments:
I’m inspired by the Owens-Corning basement finishing system, which consists of large panels for the walls with the joints covered by snap-together trim. The system is designed to allow you to easily remove the trim and a panel or two in order to run new wires or patch a leak or whatever. Imagine, a house component designed with long-term maintenance in mind!
How is the trim usually attached? If you finished it before attaching it, would the process of attaching it do damage to the finish?
Still, it definitely seems like you should finish the walls and floors before attaching the trim, even if you wait to finish the trim until it's attached.
The trim is usually nailed into place using a nail gun (which usually drives the nail below the surface of the trim). That wouldn't damage the finish, though it would mean that there'd be a small hole through the finish. But the nail head usually won't take finish anyway. If you're using a filler over the nails (which I don't think most people bother with), I don't think it would matter whether the finish or the nails came first.
Actually, when we had new floors installed, they put quarter round against the walls. We got the quarter round ahead of time, and the installers suggested that we go ahead and paint it first, because they said it would be easier for us in the long run. They used finishing nails to install it and they did put filler on top of it. Since we had painted the trim white and the filler was white, it wasn't really noticeable, but it would have been possible to go back and touch up those areas easily if necessary.
Did they polyurethane the floors before installing the quarter-round? Or was it prefinished flooring or Pergo where it doesn't get finished in place?
It was Pergo, but i would still think you would want to finish the floors before installing the trim (unless maybe the trim protects the wall from being stained?)
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