Gates Reno

There were still enough of the old baseboards left to try to match what was there rather than start fresh, so Mr. Contractor had a knife cut to approximate the old moulding. It’s not exactly the same (it’s a more interesting design, we think), but we can get away with it because there’s only one place in the whole upper two floors where the old and new meet up, near the staircase (pics above).

Unfortunately, the moulding that’s in the same areas as the original moulding (in the hallways and stairwells) is shorter than what was originally there, because the original moulding lost a few inches when new plywood and floors were put down. But in the bedrooms, where there’s no original moulding, they made it tall. Omer was rather surprised/dismayed at how tall it looked while sitting in a pile in the hallway, but admitted that it looked good once it was installed and painted.

The weird thing about the new moulding is that it looks, well, new. It doesn’t have thirty layers of paint on it like the old moulding and the old window casings. The extra paint softens the edges and gives it character.