The Cool House: molding
Showing posts with label molding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label molding. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Hair, Bristle and Profiles


Note to self and other interested parties: Never, ever, leave the State or even the house so the flooring guy can sand and seal the floors and stain the baseboards and trim without getting pet dander in the mix. Not unless you are prepared, upon returning from vacation, to find that he has sealed someone else's hair and a handful of grit into your kitchen floor and stained three hundred feet of baseboard that doesn't match the rest of your uniquely modern house. Be aware that the feeling of nausea and subsequent meltdown when you survey the mess will last much longer than the three weeks it takes for the smell of floor sealer to dissipate from the house.
The kitchen floor has to be redone but with two dogs and four cats this is no easy (or cheap) undertaking. We decided to wait until we were on another trip so the animals would be in kennels anyway. However I'm really unhappy about leaving the guys to correct their mistakes without supervision. My supervision!
Then there's the baseboard. Stain grade baseboard. Roughly twice the price of the pre-primed stuff, more when you add in the time to actually stain it the correct shade. Leaving aside the occasional brush bristle in the finish - after all we don't have to use those pieces (eye roll) - there's the fact that it's 1/4" too narrow and the profile is rounded. It's not as if I wasn't explicit about it matching the rest of the trim in the house. This carpenter had installed the square edge in the master bedroom a few years back, when I also made him replace a piece in the closet that he thought "would do". He knows I am that obsessive.
And he really shouldn't have said that was all that was available in his catalog. Because he know I am going to check. It took an hour on Saturday morning to find two lumber yards - both in this town- that have stain grade baseboard the right size, and both were cheaper than what he told me he paid. I think he should suck it up and reorder the molding. He offered to have the rounded edge routered off - at my cost. Changing the edge isn't going to make it grow an extra quarter inch wider, is it? And the molding can't go on until the floor is redone so we are at an impasse. I guess I'm lucky he didn't get around to the trim.
The great baseboard/molding/flooring debacle is holding up the completion of the renovation and I'm frustrated that something that should have been done by the end of July has dragged on another month with the very real possibility of going through until Fall.