We’re making some progress, finally. The house is starting to look like a house. The plasterers (stucco) guys came a week ago, so that is done. I am painting the interior trim inside and trying to get paint on the walls, but I am waiting on some color selections. So far we have two rooms picked out. The guest room is completely painted. This is our “Nod to the Beach” bedroom and will be a blue/gray walls with tones of brown in the linens.

We are not usually big color sample types. Eve usually has a good idea of what she wants and we just go with it. In this case, we wanted to make sure that the color didn’t look off in the late day sun. 

I used the Ben Moore Aura paint in this room, which I love (except the price – good thing I get contractor pricing), but it is a pain to work with. It dries so fast, it is impossible to keep a wet edge. The nice thing about it is you can cut in an entire room, then go back and roll out the walls and it absolutely will not show lap marks or color differences. Even with the open time extender, by the time I finish cutting in and cleaning the brush, it is ready to roll.

Since I am a former trim carpenter (I worked my way through college doing trim work.) I always go custom with the trim. The stock profiles that are out there do nothing for me, and it’s easy to get a really high-end, custom finish with standard moldings. In this case, we wanted something that was modern, but still had Craftsman elements. My sales guy at the lumberyard and I came up with this design.

Version 1. I mostly liked this design, but felt like the plinth block was too tall. I also didn’t care for the variation in thickness between the casing and plinth.

I was pretty happy with it. Though there is a bit of custom milling that I have to do at home.In order to get the base cap, I need to rip a strip off the casing I ordered. It saved me some money to do it this way, but it will cost me some time. (Not a lot, though, probably an hour at the table saw.)

Version 2: To fix the thickness issue, I ran a strip of the base “show” across the front of the casing.

The second variation is better, but presents finishing problems. The casing edges are eased slightly, so having that strip across the front creates a gap at the rounded corners. A better design would have the casing sitting on top. In the final version, I will install a piece of base cap on top of the plinth, then stack the casing on top of it. That keeps a 1/4-inch reveal from the plinth to the cap to the casing. The margins stay consistent and the look is unified.

I spend a day sanding all the trim boards, including the interior doors.

Production line trim sanding. Everything went smoothly (Ha, get it?) except for the 1/4-in x 1-1/2-in strips, they whipped around everywhere and generally sucked to deal with. 

The doors are a basic flat panel door in Douglas fir. Even though we are painting everything bright white, I just prefer wood doors over MDF. 

I spent a day priming the doors, then another sanding the primer and touching up areas that needed some extra attention. Yesterday, I sprayed two coats of Ben Moore Regal semi-gloss. They looked good when I racked them up, so I am excited to see how they finished out. Unfortunately, I got called for jury duty, so I’m sitting in the courthouse now instead of working on the rest of the trim.

Oh, well, at least it gives me a chance to catch up on the blog!