Life on Rancho Relaxo: Trim

After two and a half years of living in our house the trim has actually hit the walls. We've decided to work from the back of the house forward, one room at a time, finishing each room completely as we go, that way by the time we get to the main areas we have all the kinks out. ***That is a huge piece of of advice for anyone doing any home renovation/house build projects, especially something you have never done before. Always start in the area that is least seen. You will make mistakes and you will improve as you go.***

Now I'm sure you know that you can go to your local home building center buy trim, paint it and slap it up in your house, as long as you have a miter saw and some patience you are good to go (I made that sound a little easier than it really is.) That's not how we chose to do it though, we like to make sure we do everything the most difficult way (Curtis likes to make sure he gets new tools from each project). It started two years ago when we purchased a giant load of rough cut aspen boards from a local lumber yard. The boards were fresh and had to be dried before we could use them for trim so we stacked them in the garage to dry as we worked on other projects, building a shop, landscaping, drywalling the basement and such. When the shop was complete we moved all the boards by hand to the shop and re-stacked them to dry further. At some point we tried planing some boards flat and got a feel for how much work would be involved using the planer we had. Before you knew it Curt was driving home with a Woodmaster (new tool) that a local guy happened to be selling on kijiji. It is one of those machines that they advertise at the back of woodworking magazines, they call it the "Four Way Money Maker". It was a lot of money and we had to hold our breath the first time we used it, hoping it wouldn't blow our breaker, but it didn't and it does some nice work. Curt put a lot of time into planing boards and then running them through the machine a few more times to make trim. We then spent about a month paining a dozen sample trying to choose the colour, everything from white to light to dark. Curt would come home each day with a couple more cans of stain and paint a chunk of trim and then we would stare at them unable to decide. Finally when we made up our mind the trim went up and it looks amazing.

I love the ledges on the windows

One of the questions we got from everyone that entered our house was "what are you going to do with the beams?" They are bright orange (you can see them in one of the photos below) and they really pop out at you in their unfinished state. Voila, a finished beam, I love it!

I even got shelves in my bathroom closet.

We still have a few things to finish up in the bathroom, taking the photo above I was reminded of the vent cover I need to put on the wall, oops, that's my job.

Curt also made a transition strip between the tile in the bathroom and the hardwood in the bedroom.

Thank goodness because prior to that it was an ugly gap that collected dust, dirt, Polly Pocket shoes, beads, Lite-Brite pegs etc.

Next on the list, the Master Bedroom. I'd like to paint the wall behind the bed, maybe a raspberry red colour, I'm not sure. All the walls need another coat of paint, would you believe there are dirty fingerprints all over the walls and even a few pencil scribbles.